Developer runs modern LLMs on a 2013 GTX 770 with a five-byte firmware patch

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A developer has demonstrated that NVIDIA's Kepler-generation GTX 770, officially abandoned by NVIDIA after driver version 470.256.02, can still run modern large language model inference workloads on Linux kernel 7.x. Two core obstacles were overcome: the legacy driver source code failed to compile against kernels 6.15 and above due to removed APIs, and the CUDA initialization routine returned an error caused by a hardcoded version check inside the proprietary libcuda.so library. Community-sourced kernel patches resolved the compilation issues, while a targeted five-byte binary patch to the shared library bypassed the version mismatch that blocked CUDA from initializing. Additional changes to llama.cpp source code and the use of CUDA 10.2 tooling with Clang allowed the project to build and run successfully on the GPU's older sm_30 architecture. Benchmark results showed the GTX 770 delivering roughly 1.8 times faster prompt processing compared to CPU-only inference, with the project framed as both an e-waste reduction effort and a practical exercise in low-level systems engineering.

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