(Pre) Fermi support?

[Napoleon]

Uh-oh, Win10 Tech Preview led me to believe that I could still use my pre-Fermi NVidia iGPU for display and some BOINCing. Apparently not so, I ended up disabling the iGPU and installing the latest WHQL for Win10. As you probably know, NVidia has dropped pre-Fermi support in new drivers quite some time ago.

I wonder if NV would be willing to make a Win10 version of 327.23 or 341.44...

[JimboPalmer]

In what way would that benefit the Nvidia Corporation?

[Napoleon]

I wonder how it benefited them to have the support in Tech Preview, only to drop it in actual Win10 release. Not exactly brilliant customer retention policy. At least I was a bit disappointed.
People who are still using pre-Fermi GPUs are likely to upgrade soon, so there might be some payoff for NVidia to keep them happy.

Then again, could be that the pre-Fermi support wasn't of good enough quality for production release and MS decided to drop it. Go figure.

[7im]

Current version and one previous version. That is what a lot of corporations support. Roll back one version in windows and the NV support comes with it.

[toTOW]

This is indeed weird : MS tool allowed me to reserve a copy of Windows 10 after a compatibility check although the machine has 9800 GTX+ GPUs in it. I guess they won't be supported after the upgrade ...

[Napoleon]

Yep, I was able to make the reservation as well, although I ended up downloading an .ISO and upgrading from DVD after all.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/softwar ... /windows10

Anyway, you'll get a barebones MS video driver, dated 2006... so no GPGPU and very few - if any - HW acceleration features utilized. Plus a yellow exclamation mark in Device Manager, indicating a problem or limited functionality. I figured I'll just disable the iGPU (equivalent of 9400GT) to avoid complications. At least I gained 512MB extra RAM from that. The GPU lag is tolerable in most of my use cases, so I can make do without the iGPU. To recap, you can get WinX up and running - or crouched and limping, if you prefer - with a pre-Fermi, but most likely you won't be happy with the results.

There was a pleasant surprise after upgrading from Win7 - the upgrade cleaned up a few years worth of bloat. I gained over 5GB free space on my C: drive after running Disk Cleanup of system files! So far, the only app having problems after the upgrade was an old CyberLink Blu-ray Disc Suite which I don't miss much at the moment. So I don't think I will be rolling back to Win7, as long as these two remain the only problems.

Another caveat, conveniently published 07/29/2015 12:29 AM:
http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/ ... phics-card

Maxwell and Kepler GPU architectures support Windows 10 WDDM 2.0 mode with support for Fermi coming at a later date. At the time of Windows 10 launch, the GeForce Fermi architecture operates in WDDM 1.3 mode. Since it is not possible to load both NVIDIA WDDM 2.0 and 1.3 mode drivers at the same time, you will not be able to mix Fermi class GPU(s) with Kepler/Maxwell class GPUs.

[7im]

Sounds like the MS definition of compatible is much more open than what users of that software would say.

[Napoleon]

Looks like I spoke too soon. I posted updated info after testing again, viewtopic.php?f=61&t=27926&p=278285#p278285.