This depends a bit on the distro you are using. Like in arch you should not use the proprietary drivers for older cards but the open ones. My guess is there are some community drivers you should use instead.

[–] WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

you mean the nouveau driver? the one that is unable to up the frequencies from the minimum because it is not signed by nvidia? it may work as a display output, but not much else

[–] FuckBigTech347@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 3 days ago

Even if you happen to use older NVidia cards from before they started doing signed firmware blobs the experience is miserable.
Nouveau has 0 dynamic power management, so the only way to change clocks speeds is via a debug interface in /sys/.
Everytime you change clock speeds the driver can crash. And while some software does become usable it tends to be very unstable because some features are just not implemented or only half-implemented, leading to graphical glitches and unpredictable behaviour.

It's a shame because I really feel like nouveau could be a great piece of software, but unfortunately nobody is working on it anymore.

[–] firelizzard@programming.dev 2 points 6 days ago

😆😂🤣 Are you kidding? Have you tried using nouveau? It works, sure, but you can’t play games that are even vaguely modern and if something uses up a bit too much RAM the entire display system starts jittering/lagging or becomes unresponsive. Source: I ran nouveau with a GTX 2080 for years. I was only able to fully ditch Windows once I fully ditched Nvidia (by switching to an AMD GPU and scrubbing every last vestige of Nvidia’s bullshit off my PC).