News Nvidia starts phasing out Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs — GeForce driver support status unclear

[Admin]

Nvidia has revealed Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures are considered feature-complete and will be frozen in an upcoming CUDA release.

Nvidia starts phasing out Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs — GeForce driver support status unclear : Read more

 

[Ryus]

I mean nothing lasts forever and it was just a matter of time until when, but...

I hope they at least have the decency to wait until the 50 series stock issues have stabilized. As I was planning on upgrading my Titan V to a 5090 anyways (or the 5080 Super nextish year or 6090 in another few years) as it's not really keeping up to what I want any more. Which is when you should be upgrading.

 

[razor512]

I am hoping that they keep support going for a longer. Most people like to reuse older cards in secondary systems, and it would be horrible to lose out on that because an older card will not get a security issue patched.

 

[rambo919]

Given that these GPU's are already deprecated in the current Linux drivers (v550 being the last supported) they are probably looking for any excuse to do the same with the Windows drivers.

 

[KyaraM]

It's crucial to highlight that this has nothing to do with GeForce gaming driver support. In fact, Maxwell and Pascal continue to be on the support list for the GeForce RTX series driver, unlike Kepler. Nvidia didn't detail whether or when it'll drop support for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs for the gaming driver.

I think this is pretty important. It means that people using the cards for gaming and other home uses most likely will have a bit longer, though that's probably only relevant for Pascal and later anyways. Since Pascal is probably the most popular architecture, though, it is still good news for owners of these cards.

 

[OldAnalogWorld]

I have repeatedly seen that new versions of drivers for old hardware are always worse than the old ones in terms of real performance and functions. Remember how NVidia cut support for a large part of the driver functionality after the XP versions. nView and all that. So it is more likely that we should talk about the gradual degradation of drivers, rather than their improvement and new functions for old hardware. At the same time, the size occupied on the disk by NVidia drivers has become simply insane - more than 1 GB. Given that the key functionality does not take up even 100 MB in the form of binary files. Let me remind you that XP itself was less than 3 GB...

 

[rambo919]

I have repeatedly seen that new versions of drivers for old hardware are always worse than the old ones in terms of real performance and functions. Remember how NVidia cut support for a large part of the driver functionality after the XP versions. nView and all that. So it is more likely that we should talk about the gradual degradation of drivers, rather than their improvement and new functions for old hardware. At the same time, the size occupied on the disk by NVidia drivers has become simply insane - more than 1 GB. Given that the key functionality does not take up even 100 MB in the form of binary files. Let me remind you that XP itself was less than 3 GB...

It's not only that, what will happen in this case is they will simply recommend you stop upgrading your drivers because if you do weird things will start happening including blue screens, so situations will happens where even if a new game could technically limp along it wont even start because it requires a driver level patch. De facto soft locking.

A lot of the degradation will then be because you have upgraded past the recommended version, though I do remember that the OS was more stable with a driver version a few versions before that final one. Basically it was all simply them stopping caring.

You think 1GB is bad, due to a bug last year I think it was or the year before that on Linux the flatpak driver package was 5GB+.... which was brought down to 1-3GB. Something like that can't remember the details.

 

[Joseph_138]

I have repeatedly seen that new versions of drivers for old hardware are always worse than the old ones in terms of real performance and functions. Remember how NVidia cut support for a large part of the driver functionality after the XP versions. nView and all that. So it is more likely that we should talk about the gradual degradation of drivers, rather than their improvement and new functions for old hardware. At the same time, the size occupied on the disk by NVidia drivers has become simply insane - more than 1 GB. Given that the key functionality does not take up even 100 MB in the form of binary files. Let me remind you that XP itself was less than 3 GB...

The problem is that what I see happening, increasingly, is that games are requiring certain driver revisions just to get them to run. If your drivers are too old, they either won't run, or will have problems if they do run. I have gotten popups already, on some of my older PC's, telling me to upgrade to a particular driver version, or later, to run the game. Those machines all have cards in them that are on legacy support, and can't be updated beyond what they're using. Using older drivers, to get better performance, really isn't working as well as it used to, if the older drivers can't run your games anymore.