Yesterday I got bored and decided to try out my old GPUs with Vulkan. I had an HD 5830, GTX 460 and GTX 770 4Gb laying around so I figured "Why not".
Long story short - Vulkan didn't recognize them, hell, Linux didn't even recognize them. They didn't show up in nvtop, nvidia-smi or anything. I didn't think to check dmesg.
Honestly, I thought the 770 would work; it hasn't been in legacy status that long. It might work with an older Nvidia driver version (I'm on 550 now) but I'm not messing with that stuff just because I'm bored.
So for now the oldest GPUs I can get running are a Ryzen 5700G APU and 1080ti. Both Vega and Pascal came out in early 2017 according to Wikipedia. Those people disappointed that their RX 500 and RX 5000 don't work in Ollama should give Llama.cpp Vulkan a shot. Kobold has a Vulkan option too.
The 5700G works fine alongside Nvidia GPUs in Vulkan. The performance is what you'd expect from an APU, but at least it works. Now I'm tempted to buy a 7600 XT just to see how it does.
Has anyone else out there tried Vulkan?
I can't speak about vulkan, but I had an old GTX 680 from 2012, that has worked without issue until a year back or so. I was able to get it recognized by nvidia-smi.
I had it running using the proprietary drivers, with the instructions from here, using the legacy method: https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA#Legacy_GeForce_600.2F700
Is that what you did?
PS: When I mean working without issue I mean gaming on it using proton.
No, I didn't change my drivers at all. I figured it would probably work with older drivers. But then the problem is my 4060 won't work with anything older than 545(I think).
I do have another PC I could put the 770 in. That might be worth trying.
It just kills me to have these old cards sitting around doing nothing. The 770 was kind of a beast in its time. But that's life.
I guess I could donate them to some Peertuber who does retro videos or something.
A few pics of them in their heyday (ok, they were already past their prime at the time)
Well, in the case of legacy GPUs you are forced to downgrade drivers. In that case, you can no longer use your recent and legacy GPU simultaneously, if that's what you were hoping for.
But if you do go the route of legacy drivers, they work fine.
I guess if I get REALLY bored, I might do a fresh install and load up legacy drivers just to see what the performance is like with the old cards. It would be interesting to see how they stack up to the Vega APU.
I'm not going to actually use these cards, just trying them out for the heck of it.
I think you may be able to use a podman container and pass the gpu over. It will for sure be easier than reinstalling .