TECH NEWS – This doesn’t mean that the graphics cards in question won’t suddenly get more drivers, but developer support is a harbinger of things to come.

The latest update to Nvidia’s Cuda Toolkit (version 12.8) says that support for Maxwell and Pascal architectures (and Volta, not intended for desktops) will be dropped in an upcoming update. This applies to GTX 900 and 1000 (and M and P for Quadro cards for workstations). However, there will still be new drivers for the cards, and although Nvidia did not say for how long, it is possible to calculate from the previous example.

In the March 2022 Steam hardware survey, the GTX 1060 was still the most popular card, even though it was already six years old. And the GTX 970 showed up in the minimum system requirements for Dragon Age: The Veilguard, even though the AAA RPG came out ten years after the graphics card was released. In the December 2024 survey, the Maxwell and Pascal architectures together accounted for 10.75% of gamers surveyed.

When Cuda stopped supporting the Kepler architecture (this applies to GTX 700 and 600 cards), it was in version 10.2 in November 2019. The archive website was updated in 2020, but the Kepler release site went live in 2019, and the last driver for the architecture arrived in August 2021. It follows that Nvidia will support 900 and 1000 GeForce GTX graphics cards for about two more years. Compared to Kepler, Maxwell’s Cuda support lasted two years longer, and given the large user base of Maxwell and Pascal architecture to date (because at that time the company’s cards were still available at really affordable prices), it is understandable why this is happening.

Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 980 Ti became the most powerful consumer graphics card with a DVI port, but the world has changed since then. And anyone who sticks with their PC for a decade with unchanged specs can be called persistent…

Source: PCGamer, Nvidia, Steam, Internet Archive