Which CUDA Toolkit version for older NVIDIA Driver

Question

I have been provided an older NVIDIA graphics card (GeForce 8400 GS) to begin exploring some GPU computing. I have tried to complete the installation successfully but have stumbled upon a problem. Here are my steps (on Ubuntu 14.04)

sudo apt-get install nvidia-current (this installs nvidia-304 in my case)

After rebooting, a quick query shows that my kernel is indeed using nvidia successfully

lspci -vnn | grep -i VGA -A 12

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation GT218 [GeForce 8400 GS Rev. 3] [10de:10c3] (rev a2) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
...
Kernel driver in use: nvidia

Naturally, I thought I could then install cuda with:

sudo apt-get install cuda

But this tries to install nvidia-346 on my system causing my system to no longer display my desktop and the installation is incorrect. I have verified that the nvidia-346 is the problem by specifically installing it as opposed to nvidia-current. The Linux Getting Started Manual says I should just need to install CUDA with apt-get but I need an older driver for my graphics card.

How can I install CUDA to work correctly with my older nvidia driver so I can conduct some GPU computations? Is there a list someplace that lists the what CUDA toolkits go with each NVIDIA driver? I suspect I need an older toolkit, I just don't know which one.

Answer 1

I did not find an official NVIDIA document, but here is a list containing the minimum driver versions up to CUDA 6.5:

http://docs.roguewave.com/totalview/8.14.1/html/index.html#page/User_Guides/totalviewug-about-cuda.31.4.html

So for your driver version 304 this means CUDA 5 is supported.

However, there should be a newer driver (version 340.76) available which still supports your card according to NVIDIA (see "Supported Products"):

http://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/81761/en-us

Using this driver you should be able to use CUDA 6.5.

Answer 2

Finally Nvidia decided to add a table to the release notes in which the driver versions are determined. Here is the link from Nvidia documentation for Cuda version 10 and here is the screenshot:

Also according to Cuda installation logs in Ubuntu and another stackoverflow post CUDA toolkits require the following minimum Nvidia driver versions in Linux OS:

at least 340.00 is required for CUDA 6.5 at least 331.00 is required for CUDA 6.0 at least 319.00 is required for CUDA 5.5