Support for These NVIDIA Models is Being Discontinued

NVIDIA‘s official “Unix graphics feature deprecation schedule” has been updated, and this information, noticed on Reddit, revealed an important change that concerns many gamers. Accordingly, the Unix 580 series drivers will be the last version to fully support the Maxwell, Pascal and Volta architectures. This development means the beginning of the end, especially for GTX 700, 900 and 10 series graphics card users.

The End of the Road is in Sight for NVIDIA GTX 10, 9 and 7 Series

The Maxwell architecture covers the GTX 700 and 900 series, while Pascal covers the GTX 10 series. Although this update seems to only concern Unix-based systems at first glance, in reality these drivers and Windows drivers share the same core structure. This means that the Windows driver series, which will be released at the same time as the Unix 580 series, will also be the last fully supported version given to these architectures.

Currently, the 576 series drivers are used on Windows, and the latest update was released on June 17 as 576.80. Since NVIDIA’s driver branches generally change every two to four months, it is expected that the 580 series, i.e. the end of support, will also be reflected on the Windows side towards the end of 2025. After this date, optimizations for newly released games will no longer cover these older cards.

The Volta architecture, on the other hand, does not create a significant change for gamers, as it is more relevant to enterprise systems. Cards such as the GTX 1650 and 1660 are excluded from this scope because they use the newer Turing architecture. However, a wide range of users from the GTX 750 to the GTX 1080 Ti will soon be excluded from the “Game Ready” optimizations.

While critical updates such as security patches will continue for a while, the performance updates that old card owners will receive from new-generation games will now be a thing of the past. It is debatable how appropriate this decision is; However, it is not stingy that the Maxwell architecture, which was released in 2014, has been supported for about 11 years, and Pascal for 9 years. For users who want to prepare for new games, this is a clear sign that it is time to upgrade their system.

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