[mythtv-users] Is it worth upgrading from an nVidia GT520?

[Stephen Worthington]

On Sun, 12 Jan 2020 13:13:09 -0700, you wrote:

>[29.1 on Fedora 26 for now]
>
>Up until my MythTv FE/BE died I had been running an nVidia GT 520 video card 
>using the akmod drivers and VDPAU. It's worked fine as far as I can tell. But 
>I see support is Legacy now so I've wondered if I might benefit from a newer 
>card.
>
>But there are lots of cards in https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/
>legacy-gpu/ that my local shop still offers for sale, toward the cheaper end 
>of cards. It looks like GT-8xxx and below are all Legacy.
>
>My local shop seems to have the GT1030-2G-CSM as its cheapest non-Legacy 
>fanless card, which, coincidentally looks just like the GT520 I have (and the 
>GS8400 I mistakenly put in when I rebuilt the box in a rush after it died).
>
>Meanwhile, a GT710 card is half the price but still Legacy.
>
>The 8400 is definitely not as good as the 520, but I'm wondering, since I have 
>to put the 520 back in anyway, if there's a reason to upgrade to a newer card.
>
>All I do is feed a 23" monitor from DVI and a 22" monitor from HDMI for 
>watching TV. I watch a lot of sports, so VDPAU is important.
>
>Other than "newer", would I benefit from a newer card?

If you want to do 4k, then you might benefit from a newer card.
Otherwise, there is no need as long as you can still get Nvidia
drivers for the kernels you are using.  My mother's MythTV box is now
stuck on Mythbuntu 16.04 since her motherboard's builtin Nvidia
chipset no longer has driver support from Nvidia.  It would be still
possible to download the old drivers from Nvidia and run a patch on
them to use the kernels in 18.04, but even that will likely stop
working at some point.  My GT220 card in my 18.04 MythTV box is also
"legacy" now, but Nvidia are still providing updates of the older
drivers that support it for another year or so.  After that, I will be
forced to upgrade it, even though the hardware is fanless and likely
to keep on going for a long time.

It seems that Nvidia presumes that all their old cards will have died
or stopped being used by now.  Which is likely true to a large extent
with their cards using fans, as the fan dies and that kills the chips.
And also with Windows boxes, as Windows keeps on outgrowing the PC's
capabilities and they get replaced.  But for us folks, old Windows PCs
are still excellent Linux boxes and MythTV only needs VDPAU to 1080p
so we tend to keep on using the old video cards until they actually
die.  And I have never had any of my fanless Nvidia cards die.

When MythTV starts supporting 4k and we get 4k broadcasts, then we
will all need upgraded cards.  Until then, it is going to be a big
pain that Nvidia is dropping support for the older cards.

For my test PC (Ubuntu 18.04 and Windows 10 dual boot), its GT220 card
with fan died last year, so I replaced it with a fanless 1030 card and
that is working well.  I did also have to get an HDMI to VGA
converter, as that PC is on my KVM switch that only does VGA.  I also
replaced my ancient 9300? card in my Windows box with a fanless 1030
card, as the 9300 was unable to handle some 4k H.265 videos I
downloaded.  On my GT220 in my MythTV box, those same videos play just
fine, so there is really no need to replace that.  It seems that
MythTV scales 4k videos to play on my 1080p TV very nicely, at least
for the few files I have tried.