Apparently, it is not only my oberservation, but the article says similarly:

The inconsistent approach to backward compatibility in decades past may also have played a part.

However, I’m not a db admin and my perspective might be biased (infosec).

I would say that this is a sign of a bad product. Apparently, compatibility between SQL server versions is not great.

You’re right, the new open source driver does not support the 1000 series and older, only Turing (2000 series) and above.

The autotldr-bot only summarized the first page, so here are some more quotes. Basically, the performance was almost identical, with two notable exceptions.

Across a variety of demanding GPU benchmarks the NVIDIA R550 open kernel driver continued to perform on-par with the proprietary driver for these GeForce RTX 40 graphics cards.

While running Blender 4.0 the proprietary kernel driver seemed to yield slightly better performance. It was just fractions of a second but was rather consistently showing the proprietary driver having that slight advantage here, unlike in other workloads.

There was the small advantage too that during periods of brief downtime using the open kernel driver appeared to deliver slightly lower GPU power consumption than the proprietary driver.

Does anyone have an idea what’s the point with the proprietary driver now? Does it have any features missing in the open driver?