Nvidia to discontinue support for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPU series, with the 580 drivers being the final ones to support GTX 900 and 1000 graphics cards.
In a recent announcement, Nvidia has revealed that their driver branch 580 will be the last to support GPUs based on the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures, effectively marking the end of official driver updates for the GeForce GTX 900 and GTX 10 series cards, including popular models like the GTX 1060, 1070, and 1080.
This decision means that after the release of the successor driver branch (e.g., 590), there will be no further official driver updates for these legacy GPU architectures on both Unix (Linux) and Windows platforms. The affected architectures include Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta, which encompass the GTX 7 and GTX 900 series, GTX 10 series, and Titan V, respectively.
However, it's worth noting that the GTX 16 series (Turing architecture) and newer Nvidia GPUs remain fully supported and are not affected by this change. Users of affected GPUs will still be able to use existing driver versions in the 580 series branch, but will not receive new updates or optimizations beyond that point.
Nvidia has not yet confirmed the support for the GTX 600 and GTX 700 cards on Windows. Meanwhile, the latest Nvidia GeForce driver at the time of writing is version 576.80 WHQL, and we haven't reached the 580 series drivers yet.
The company has a history of deprecating graphics architectures, as they did with the Kepler architecture in 2021. The 470 drivers were the last to support graphics cards based on the Kepler architecture, which includes the GeForce GTX 600 and GTX 700 series for consumers. Despite the lack of mainline updates, Nvidia still delivered some subsequent updates for security patching purposes for the Kepler architecture.
This move reflects the end of an 8-11 year lifecycle for these GPU architectures and encourages users to consider upgrading if they want continued driver support and enhancements. Users should keep an eye on Nvidia's official announcements for the release of the 580 series drivers and any potential updates regarding support for the GTX 600 and GTX 700 cards.
The forthcoming Nvidia driver branch 590 will no longer support data-and-cloud-computing for GPUs based on the Maxwell, Pascal, Volta, and some legacy Kepler architectures, including popular gadgets like the GTX 600, GTX 700, GTX 900, GTX 10 series, and Titan V. Despite this, technology advancements have ensured that the GTX 16 series and newer Nvidia GPUs remain fully supported and unimpacted by this change.
