Nvidia to axe Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs with end of driver support — 580 series drivers will be the last to support GTX 900 and 1000 cards

(Image credit: Nvidia)

It looks like the writing is on the wall for the Nvidia Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPU architectures. According to an official Nvidia Unix graphics feature deprecation schedule, driver branch 580 will be the last to include support for these architectures (h/t Longhorn on X). For consumers, that means the 580 drivers will be the last to deliver updates that address the GeForce GTX 900 and legendary GTX 1000 series of graphics cards. As Nvidia maintains a unified driver codebase, it looks pretty certain that this Unix schedule will also apply to Windows drivers.

driver support statement — (Image credit: Future)

The key statement of intent from the updated schedule is as follows: “The release 580 series will be the last to support GPUs based on the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures.” Though it looks pretty certain to apply to Windows, too, we have reached out to Nvidia to remove any doubt regarding the support for GTX 900 and GTX 1000 cards on Windows. The company wasn't immediately available for comment.

GTX consigned to history, almost

Quite remarkably, when the day comes and Nvidia moves onto the 590 driver branch, support for the storied GTX line will have almost come to an end. The next gen facing the chopping block would be the Turing architecture GPUs, also known as the RTX 20 series. However, some GTX cards based on Turing were also produced and proved quite popular among budget buyers.

Owners of graphics cards from the GTX 16 series, based on Turing GPUs, will have the dubious honor of rocking the last supported GTX graphics cards from Nvidia. That means popular cards like the GTX 1660 Super will continue to get driver support into the 590 drivers era, and probably beyond.

The last time Nvidia gave notice that it was killing off support for a graphics architecture was back in 2021. As we reported at the time, the 470 drivers were the last to support graphics cards based on the Kepler architecture. These you might know better as the GeForce GTX 600 and GTX 700 series graphics cards for consumers. Despite the lack of mainline updates, Nvidia still went on to deliver some subsequent updates for security patching purposes.

The latest Nvidia GeForce driver at the time of writing is version 576.80 WHQL, so we haven’t reached the 580 series drivers yet.

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Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.

10 Comments Comment from the forums

rluker5

Kind of a shame. Seeing as how the base fp32 architecture hasn't changed that much it probably wasn't a lot of extra work and everyone knew GTX cards couldn't do DLSS or RTX stuff.

Maybe cleaning things up will help with 50 series stability.
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ezst036

Planned obsolescence.
Reply
Notton

My 1070Ti is still running well. I doubt it's in perfect working condition, but IDK if it's the driver or hardware because nvidia.
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rluker5

Notton said:
My 1070Ti is still running well. I doubt it's in perfect working condition, but IDK if it's the driver or hardware because nvidia.
I just upgraded my daughter's pc because W10 (it turned out her 4770k wasn't even W10 compliant and the Fury Nitro she had lost driver support years ago) with a 13600k and 1070ti. Techpowerup is wrong. The 1070ti is much more than 143% the performance of the R9 Fury. 1070ti is still pretty good in most games but does struggle in newer ones. Bad timing I guess, but still way better than what she had and is an excuse for me to eventually pass down my office A750.

But since Nvidia has such a dominant position in the pc gaming market I just though that ending support for non RTX cards that still work well with the rest of their drivers may be an indication that ALL cards that can't do RTX stuff may effectively be losing driver support due to a degree of forced RT/AI upscaling coming to new games. Can backwards hardware compatibility with the consoles do enough to slow this down or will they get special editions of these games with bad lighting?

The RX 5000/6000/7000 series are already dropping relative to more RT/AI upscale capable cards in new games (6600 is aging like milk compared to the A750), is there a relative freefall in performance coming for these and the GTX within the next year?
Reply
DS426

rluker5 said:
I just upgraded my daughter's pc because W10 (it turned out her 4770k wasn't even W10 compliant and the Fury Nitro she had lost driver support years ago) with a 13600k and 1070ti. Techpowerup is wrong. The 1070ti is much more than 143% the performance of the R9 Fury. 1070ti is still pretty good in most games but does struggle in newer ones. Bad timing I guess, but still way better than what she had and is an excuse for me to eventually pass down my office A750.

But since Nvidia has such a dominant position in the pc gaming market I just though that ending support for non RTX cards that still work well with the rest of their drivers may be an indication that ALL cards that can't do RTX stuff may effectively be losing driver support due to a degree of forced RT/AI upscaling coming to new games. Can backwards hardware compatibility with the consoles do enough to slow this down or will they get special editions of these games with bad lighting?

The RX 5000/6000/7000 series are already dropping relative to more RT/AI upscale capable cards in new games (6600 is aging like milk compared to the A750), is there a relative freefall in performance coming for these and the GTX within the next year?
The 4770K isn't Windows 10 compliant? You'll have to explain that one to me. It's not Windows 11 compliant, absolutely.

I don't see how RX 6600 owners are concerned about RT. Any recent benchmarks comparing the three are mostly academic, again when you're talking about a GPU where price was a main purchasing limitation. The 1070 Ti that you put in your daughters computer would have aged like milk as well if you're going by this line of thinking, but it didn't as I don't disagree that Pascal is still relevant today (and therefore sad to see this news), especially for those that don't care about the latest bleeding-edge games.
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Kidd N

As an Nvidia owner (4070tis and a 1070 on an old rig) If AMD does (haven't researched it) offer longer support, this would be a great marketing app for them, if I knew my cards wouldn't lose support, it would make me happy

As someone who almost never sells the cards - I want a system that outlasts it's usefulness, and AMD having better Linux support gives other important options.

Nvidia has openly shown home users are -best case - an afterthought.
Reply
AeroCx

ezst036 said:
Planned obsolescence.
My brother in christ Pascal was 9 years ago. There's only so much support you can give to a platform that old.

If you want to complain about planned obsolescence, the majority of Android phones don't get basic security updates for nearly that long. They don't even find these security vulns themselves and Google is the one providing patches. Yet even billion dollar Asus refuses to implement them on their phones that are barely two years old.
Reply
rluker5

DS426 said:
The 4770K isn't Windows 10 compliant? You'll have to explain that one to me. It's not Windows 11 compliant, absolutely.

Sure, it was a surprise to me as well: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/minimum/supported/windows-10-22h2-supported-intel-processorsAnything older than Broadwell dropped right off of the list. I remember reading it had something to do with iGPU drivers or iGPU vulnerabilities.

DS426 said:
I don't see how RX 6600 owners are concerned about RT. Any recent benchmarks comparing the three are mostly academic, again when you're talking about a GPU where price was a main purchasing limitation. The 1070 Ti that you put in your daughters computer would have aged like milk as well if you're going by this line of thinking, but it didn't as I don't disagree that Pascal is still relevant today (and therefore sad to see this news), especially for those that don't care about the latest bleeding-edge games.
Perhaps it would be more understandable if I said "aged like Kepler". Wasn't the 290x vs 780ti rivalry where the 780ti barely led in benchmarks until about 2015 then they switched placed the basis for that "fine wine" description of AMD cards? You know that raytracing on can cut the relative framerate of incapable cards in half compared to their more capable counterparts right? That is a bigger drop than running out of vram and is unfixable in games that require RT. Game devs can and have made that choice and a game isn't really bleeding edge if it comes up on Game Pass and you want to play it.
Nvidia dropping support for non RT cards may be an indication that they have decided to prioritize sales of existing cards over supporting cards, some of which were for sale at the same time as the non W10 supported Devils Canyon CPUs. AMD would also benefit from Nvidia pushing game devs into having RT, AI upscaling mandatory on new games.

I don't know that this will be the case, but it does look like that is the way to profit in the dGPU market that has been seeing declining sales recently.
Reply
NightKnight1337

ezst036 said:
Planned obsolescence.
The 1080ti came out in 2017....
Reply
stonecarver

I look at the move from Nvidia to end future support drivers no different than being a buyer of a used car.

I don't expect the car manufacture to hold my hand like a buyer of an in warranty financed new car.

Maybe second or third owner and when you buy a used GPU only a delusional person would think your rewarded with a perfect gaming card even if it was a beast from the past.

If your looking for the least issues buy a new up to date video card.

But than it also depends where your budget is and what your going to play with a new or used card.

One thing I will give to PC component part manufactures is when end of life hits them the last drivers are still available. In a reasonable time period.

Depending on your usage and expectations the last driver in 2025 can still work just fine in the future.

And it does depend on if Microsoft does or does not do what they pulled back in about 2016-2017 when they hosed video cards with there October anniversary updates.

GPU's that worked just fine on day one release 2015 no longer natively worked anymore.

Not an issue for those who know how to side step the stop gags but the average user was stuck. A cheap GPU was bought, life went on.

As time goes on if your going to be running older parts keep in mind those anniversary yearly updates from Microsoft in October are not your friend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_11_version_history
Just for the record I am all for being fully upgraded but there does come a time choices have to be made to avoid a version of Windows 11 that could effect a fully functioning older machine.

I do on some machines run an older version of Windows 11 but keep the Microsoft security updates fully updated.

I will give this to Nvidia there drivers support for older cards does seem to run longer than AMD GPU's.

We got a long run out of the GTX 900's-1000's cards and just because no new driver nothing has really changed.

Run it until it no longer fits your needs. But remember expectations and reality.
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