Nvidia Dropping Driver Support for Older Graphics Cards

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Not happy about this. I work in a small computer shop, and there's still plenty of folks out there with some of these cards (including myself).
 
When your board stop being supported by the manufacturer, it's that time you look at the stars and say "I think it's time for an upgrade". My 9600GT SLI arrange served me good...
 
Natural course of things. I believe things get to a point where worrying about drivers for older cards hinders things going forward. Their is more then ample driver support for current OS's and programs that can use them.
 


You make it sound like the cards will suddenly stop working.
Given how quickly things change in this industry I think it is a little unrealistic to expect driver support for what, going on almost a decade now? Given what a drain it can be to maintain backwards compatibility I'm surprised they did it for as long as they did. Off the top of my head, I can't think of very many other hardware components you can get from 10 years ago where the manufacturer is still putting out driver updates.

And of course, looking at it strictly from a business standpoint, anyone still running a 8800GT in their main rig isn't their target consumer anyway. I mean yea I guess they could say "I'll never buy from them again!!!", but these people weren't buying from them (or anyone) anyway.
 
I've never owned a PC component that was still in serious use when the manufacturer stopped support, and I've owned a LOT of PC hardware.If your hardware is at this age, it's probably time to either accept it's current state as the best it's going to get or upgrade. It's not like new drivers suddenly double a card's speed or something.People that get burnt up about this are probably the same ones complaining that there's no standard PCI slots on MBs anymore, lol.Look at this way: now you have an excuse to overclock it until it starts on fire so you can buy a new one.
 
My 560Ti dodges another bullet! If only it was on the list, I could convince the ole' lady it's time for the 760 I been eyeballing.Ohh and everything at Staples is marked up at least 30% over its competitors. I don't know how they still exist.
 
I don't see what the problem is honestly, Even if you are hard up on money the new budget cards are not that hard to save for, Especially a second hand one or even a previous years model, Hell It's only like a few Mc Donalds meals worth seriously. If you are running cards over 5 years old then it's time to upgrade if you want continued driver support, Otherwise just keep using it till it breaks or upgrade!
 
This is just smart on the part of Nvidia because it will reduce the amount of regression testing for all those cards. If you look at a driver update you will notice that they haven't really been supporting the older cards except for validation. All off the updates seem to be updates that effect these older card are mostly SLI issues when you look at the release notes.
 
I don't see this as a big deal myself. But I can't help but notice most of the comments are midly positive... when AMD put some of their older cards on legacy support? They were pretty heavily derided for it. Just comical, that's all.
 
Honestly this is a good thing! Its nice they can stop worrying about compatibility with really old hardware and start really focusing on the current hardware. Drivers will only get better. As much as i loved my 8800GTX and my 260GTX ive moved on and still look back on those cards with happiness and love. I currently am running a 560Ti and it does what it needs to but im also running an OC q6600 @3.0 and my computer is really showing its age. Its time i just build a new machine.
 
I don't see this as a big deal myself. But I can't help but notice most of the comments are midly positive... when AMD put some of their older cards on legacy support? They were pretty heavily derided for it. Just comical, that's all.
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I don't know how that situation compared personally, but perhaps some of the legacy support was premature in AMD's case IDK no idea. In Nvidia's case I honestly can't say I'm surprised by this news at all though virtually all these cards are quiet old now anyway I'm more surprised that it didn't happen a little sooner truth be told.This really has little effect on my 8800GT and 260GTX either plenty of drivers around for it and they wouldn't really be running most newer higher end game to begin with at this point and mid range games they should still function properly with in general.The cards are so dated now anyway that I'm at the point where a GTX 750Ti upgrade is very enticing for all the advantages and new features it would provide though I'll likely hold off a bit longer for a die shrink or tier or two in the performance model lineup for this new generation of Nvidia GPU's.
 
Honestly this is a good thing! Its nice they can stop worrying about compatibility with really old hardware and start really focusing on the current hardware. Drivers will only get better. As much as i loved my 8800GTX and my 260GTX ive moved on and still look back on those cards with happiness and love. I currently am running a 560Ti and it does what it needs to but im also running an OC q6600 @3.0 and my computer is really showing its age. Its time i just build a new machine.
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That or you could simply upgrade the Q6600 to a higher end C2D/C2Q chip instead they can be had a lot cheaper than a whole motherboard/ram/cpu upgrade would cost and still generally be on par with a i5 in terms of performance. You could get a E8400 for like $20's on ebay and it would probably for gaming be better than a Q6600 despite only being dual core because it had better cash and will clock a bit higher than 3GHz with ease.A Q9550 would cost you about $70-$90 and be a fair bit better more performance with less power and heat. Depends of course on if your current board will support either of those chips or not, but it's not too unlikely they do.A i5 is fairly debatable in comparison to a Q9550 in terms of performance. On top of that I have yet to see benchmarks of a i5 compared to a Q9550 with a DDR3 1600 to DDR3 2200 motherboard with both utilizing the same speed and latency memory.DDR3 was fairly uncommon and or expensive toward the end of LGA775 life cycle, but their were some boards with support for DDR3 1600 and a few even for DDR3 2200. Latencies on DDR3 weren't as a great back though however because it wasn't as mature as it is now.
 
Honestly this is a good thing! Its nice they can stop worrying about compatibility with really old hardware and start really focusing on the current hardware. Drivers will only get better. As much as i loved my 8800GTX and my 260GTX ive moved on and still look back on those cards with happiness and love. I currently am running a 560Ti and it does what it needs to but im also running an OC q6600 @3.0 and my computer is really showing its age. Its time i just build a new machine.
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That or you could simply upgrade the Q6600 to a higher end C2D/C2Q chip instead they can be had a lot cheaper than a whole motherboard/ram/cpu upgrade would cost and still generally be on par with a i5 in terms of performance. You could get a E8400 for like $20's on ebay and it would probably for gaming be better than a Q6600 despite only being dual core because it had better cash and will clock a bit higher than 3GHz with ease.A Q9550 would cost you about $70-$90 and be a fair bit better more performance with less power and heat. Depends of course on if your current board will support either of those chips or not, but it's not too unlikely they do.A i5 is fairly debatable in comparison to a Q9550 in terms of performance. On top of that I have yet to see benchmarks of a i5 compared to a Q9550 with a DDR3 1600 to DDR3 2200 motherboard with both utilizing the same speed and latency memory.DDR3 was fairly uncommon and or expensive toward the end of LGA775 life cycle, but their were some boards with support for DDR3 1600 and a few even for DDR3 2200. Latencies on DDR3 weren't as a great back though however because it wasn't as mature as it is now.
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Don't compare an Q9550 to an I5, especially a Sany or Ivy Bridge model. Just in CPU Queen, the Q9550 gets about 25k (score) ate 3,4 GHz, while a 3,3GHz I5 2500k does over 34k. Also, on the newer platform, you get cool stuff like USB 3.0, UEFI BIOS and SATA 3, that make 2-5 second boot times a reality.
 
Fact is all the cards mentioned in the list haven't actually had THEIR drivers (so to speak) updated for the past 2 years or more. The new drivers are just checked to make sure they still work with them. All the tweaks and optimisations that each new driver set brings are purely for the newer cards.
 
Old Nvidia cards that I still possess, sitting in a box, hoping to get new life in some retro-game PC builds (for off line only):Riva 128Riva TNT2 UltraTi 46006600GT7800GS (last AGP card purchased)GTX 275Too many memories to give all those away or drop them off at a recycling facility.
 
I have an old 8800 GTS in my desktop PC, and I have to use some quite old W7 drivers for it, due to the most recent ones being cr@p when it comes to 2D support. So for me, Nvidia stopped producing drivers for my card years ago.
 
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