Best option for nVIDIA chipsets and upgrade discrete GPU's for 20.04?

[bcschmerker]

As of 11 February 2020 I am sorting out how to keep an eMachines®/Acer® EL1210-09 upgraded with an msi® GT610 1GB DDR4 low-profile VDA (nVIDIA® GF119) and Shuttle® PC6300001 running like a top through an anticipated dist-upgrade from 18.04.3-LTS Bionic to 20.04-LTS Focal. The EL1210-09 packs an nForce® 785 MCP chipset (with integrated 64-bit geForce® GPU C77), which I needed to by-pass for sufficient video memory; as of 11 February 2020 the EL1210 shuts down and reboots properly on the nVIDIA® CUDA™ driver package for the GF119, despite support being withdrawn from the C77 itself. (The X.org nouveau drivers always seem to run into the no-power-off issue with the nForce, where it halts after "[ OK ] Reached target Shutdown." and doesn't actually power down or reboot.)

Do the Kernel Project and/or X Organization have a fix in progress for the no-shutdown issue with X.org Nouveau; or should I prepare to use the CUDA driver package for Focal (as i am doing for Bionic)?

[bcschmerker]

Update: As of April 2020, Canonical opened the ubuntu® repository to nVIDIA Corporation for support of GPU's from Tesla to Kepler in Focal. Same hardware, neater package collection for Kernels 5.4.0-nn-generic. The 390 drivers run fine on the nF785/GF119 combo. As of December 2020 I'm looking at GT 720 LP cards (nVIDIA GK109 GPU, 1 GiB GDDR4 VRAM) as a contingency for failure of the msi® GT610-1GD3-LP. (I reckon that Maxwell through Ampére will need pre-boot support in the form of an nvidia-microcode package for GRUB 2.04 and subsequent.)