Driver update on Gefore 7 or older.

[Dosvelasnegras]

Sadly my 8800GT died yesterday (I just needed to cry a bit), so I have to use my old 7300LE. I had to downgrade the drivers to the 304.48 ones, as 310 driver series dropped support for Geforce 7 and older, and only supports Geforce 8 series and newer cards. But everytime I start the Steam client it bugs me to update my drivers. A check should be in place and only prompt to upgrade if the card is supported by the drivers. This is unrelated to TF2 only working with Geforce 8 and newer cards, as there are other games in Steam I can still play.

Steam seems reconize the model in system information, or at least it has a string to parse to look out for it:

Processor Information:
    Vendor:  GenuineIntel
    Speed: 2400 Mhz
    4 logical processors
    4 physical processors
    HyperThreading:  Unsupported
    FCMOV:  Supported
    SSE2:  Supported
    SSE3:  Supported
    SSSE3:  Supported
    SSE4a:  Unsupported
    SSE41:  Unsupported
    SSE42:  Unsupported
    
Network Information:
    Network Speed:  
    
Operating System Version:
    Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS (64 bit)
    Kernel Name:  Linux
    Kernel Version:  3.2.0-34-generic
    X Server vendor:  The X.Org Foundation
    X Server release:  11103000
    
Video Card:
    Driver:  NVIDIA Corporation GeForce 7300 LE/PCIe/SSE2

    Driver Version:  2.1.2 NVIDIA 304.48
    Desktop Color Depth: 24 bits per pixel
    Monitor Refresh Rate: 59 Hz
    VendorID:  0x10de
    DeviceID:  0x1d1
    Number of Monitors:  1
    Number of Logical Video Cards:  1
    Primary Display Resolution:  1440 x 900
    Desktop Resolution: 1440 x 900
    Primary Display Size: 16,06" x 10,04"  (18,94" diag)
                                            40,8cm x 25,5cm  (48,1cm diag)
    Primary Bus: PCI Express 16x
    Primary VRAM Not Detected
    Supported MSAA Modes:  2x 4x 16x 
    
Sound card:
    Audio device: 
    
Memory:
    RAM:  3953 Mb
    
Miscellaneous:
    UI Language:  English
    LANG:  es_ES.UTF-8
    Microphone:  Not set
    Total Hard Disk Space Available:  117809 Mb
    Largest Free Hard Disk Block:  75115 Mb
    
Installed software:
    
Recent Failure Reports:
    

Please stop bugging me to update my driver? :P

[John]

The latest stable legacy driver is 304.64. If you upgrade to that version, does it still bug you to update?

[Dosvelasnegras]

304.38 is the latests available in normal Ubuntu repositories. I just checked and there is a 304.64 driver available in the x-swat ppa. I will check it tomorrow, a bit late now :).

Anyway, judging by the message i get, I don't think that is the problem. It is asking me to update to nvidia-experimental-310, which doesn't support my card. The complete message text is:

Your currently installed video drive package is nvidia-experimental-304, version 304.48-0ubuntu0.1. The video driver package nvidia-experimental-310, version 310.14-0ubuntu0.1 has a more recent driver version. We recommend upgrading this package.

[Dosvelasnegras]

Tried installing the x-swat updated driver (304.64) but I'm still getting asked to upgrade my driver to the 310 one. While doing the upgrade I noticed that the list of available drivers I get from jockey also includes nvidia-experimental-310. If Steam is using jockey in some way, either through some API it provides or looking at the same db then this bug is a jockey one. If Steam keeps its own db then it is a Steam bug.

[blackout24]

Steam is not using jockey to find out your driver version. Otherwise it would not show my driver version in Arch Linux. They simply check if your driver is older than 310 regardless of card. Since 310 carrys a lot of improvements and bugfixes they want people to use it.

It's probably rather tricky to check the model series because they'd have to grab a part of the string "NVIDIA Corporation GeForce 7300 LE/PCIe/SSE2" and check if it's 8000 or newer. But 500 is also newer than 7000 ^^. So they would have to keep a list of every possible NVIDIA Model that can't update to 310 anyway. And there are a lot of different models for every series. When nvidia updates their legacy branch sometime hopefully, all of that was in vain.

[Dosvelasnegras]

Actually, at least in least in Ubuntu, they are indeed using jockey to find out if there is a newer driver package. This is indeed a bug in jockey. After cleaning the install from the check with the ubuntu-x-swat ppa driver I saw that the nvidia-experimental-310 package was still installed in my system, from the previous card, just not active. After uninstalling it jockey stopped listing it as a possibility for installation and Steam stopped asking me to update my driver.

The driver version you can see in the System Information window is clearly obtained through whatever call OpenGL has to get that info, as it spills the same string as the one you get with glxinfo. But the message I was getting had packages names and versions, not driver versions.

Also to find out your model I saw after the 1st post that they are already gathering the meaningful information: Vendor and Device IDs. If they aim to support other distros they will probably have to use that, if they aren't already using it. Nvidia has a list of supported devices with their IDs in the README.txt of every release, including lists for legacy branches, in a format that looks easy to parse. And if needed I'm sure they can get that list in any common format directly from nvidia. No idea about AMD, but I guess they can get that list easy too. And Intel.

[Aaron]

nvidia-installer has this list in a nice, ready-to-use table: https://github.com/aaronp24/nvidia-installer/blob/master/nvLegacy.h

[Frogmorton]

Was any fix found to stop Steam bugging me about newer experimental drivers, which don't work on my old hardware? It is still prompting me today, after all the updates and patches of the 4 months since the last post above.