News 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

[Admin]

An official Nvidia Unix graphics feature deprecation schedule says that driver branch 580 will be the last to include support for the Maxwell and Pascal architectures.

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 : Read more

 

[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.

 

[ezst036]

Planned obsolescence.

 

[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.

 

[rluker5]

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?

 

[DS426]

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.

 

[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.

 

[AeroCx]

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.

 

[rluker5]

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/w...ed/windows-10-22h2-supported-intel-processors
Anything older than Broadwell dropped right off of the list. I remember reading it had something to do with iGPU drivers or iGPU vulnerabilities.

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.

 

[NightKnight1337]

Planned obsolescence.

The 1080ti came out in 2017....

 

[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.

 

[Joseph_138]

Planned obsolescence.

No. Planned obsolescence is what Apple does, when they drop support after 3 years to force you to spend thousands of dollars to buy a new Mac or iPhone. Pascal will have had 10 years of support by the time the last driver drops, and Maxwell will have had even more than that. 10+ years of support is more than reasonable. Forever support is not practical for either the company, or the consumer.

 

[Joseph_138]

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.

Not only will I say that Pascal is no longer relevant, but Turing is also no longer relevant. The performance jump between Turing and Ampere is huge. An argument might be made for the 2080 Ti, because of the 11gb of VRAM, but testing is showing that even 12gb cards like the 4070 and 5070 are struggling with newer games that go over 12gb. 16gb is the norm now, and nothing with less than that is going to be able to keep up going forward. The 1080 Ti doesn't even keep pace with the 4060 Ti. With the 9060 XT being only $350-$400 in most configurations, with 16gb, there's no solid argument for staying with a Pascal based card. It's over, and it's about time.

 

[ezst036]

No. Planned obsolescence is what Apple does, when they drop support after 3 years to force you to spend thousands of dollars to buy a new Mac or iPhone. Pascal will have had 10 years of support by the time the last driver drops, and Maxwell will have had even more than that. 10+ years of support is more than reasonable. Forever support is not practical for either the company, or the consumer.

Yes. Its planned obsolescence, even at 10 years. To be fair, your pointing at Apple is a good example too. However,

We have entered a new era where GPU companies (this being AMD and Intel) have open source graphics drivers. If nothing else only on the Linux side. So then the GPU driver has three phases:

1) The active period where massive amounts of investment is put into "the item", that is, the GPU driver. (this is probably a 3 year period but YMMV)
2) The legacy period. "The item" receives minimal new features but priority for security and stability upgrades.

In planned obsolescence, you get the two, and then you're kicked to the curb like garbage. Without planned obsolescence there is what that third period looks like:

3) "the item" passes out of value for the company, but remains in value for the customer. And all of that decade's worth of work that the company put into "the item" during phases 1 and 2 remain accessible to the customer because the driver was always open source from day one. Maybe, even, the customer is capable enough of making code updates to "the item" so there is still future proofing to be made. But even if not, the driver can be re-compiled using the sources so that it is portable to future operating systems or even CPU architectures that the original manufacturer either didn't care to work on or timing wise it was just barely starting up during the beginning of the legacy period so it was de-scoped and this is not a knock on the manufacturer - it's just market timing.

Maybe you don't fully understand what planned obsolescence actually means? It's not just a silo look at the driver itself. It's the infrastructure around the GPU driver as well.

You see, that third phase allows a user to continue to leverage their hardware investment if they so choose to do that. And. They get to do said leveraging with mature code instead of being force to write a GPU driver from scratch which is an extraordinarily complex thing to do particularly if a company refuses to release reference material to do the driver writing properly.

A user can of course purchase a new GPU after 5 years and phase 3 may never matter to them. Likewise someone who buys GPUs every two years doesn't have a care in the world about planned obsolescence. Heck they might even be Mac users.

 

[DS426]

Not only will I say that Pascal is no longer relevant, but Turing is also no longer relevant. The performance jump between Turing and Ampere is huge. An argument might be made for the 2080 Ti, because of the 11gb of VRAM, but testing is showing that even 12gb cards like the 4070 and 5070 are struggling with newer games that go over 12gb. 16gb is the norm now, and nothing with less than that is going to be able to keep up going forward. The 1080 Ti doesn't even keep pace with the 4060 Ti. With the 9060 XT being only $350-$400 in most configurations, with 16gb, there's no solid argument for staying with a Pascal based card. It's over, and it's about time.

Relevance and vendor support are two different things. Related, but let's not conflate the two.

 

[DS426]

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.

Yes, software and hardware support cycles are too short across the board -- not just dinging nVidia here. AMD dropped support for Polaris and Vega in Windows drivers, so the boat is about the same either way.

How do you figure the "majority" of Android phones? Samsung used to provide security updates for five years, which they then extended to seven years on January 2024:

https://security.samsungmobile.com/workScope.smsb

Also, Google has the Mobile Vulnerability Rewards Program to incentivize bug hunting on Android, so no, it isn't just all on manufacturers to find them. ASUS... I used to be a big fan but I just think they've really gone downhill in recent years as witnessed by findings at Gamers Nexus. They used to be enthusiast-centric almost as much as EVGA but have just become a big bloated profit-maximizing mega corp. No offense to ASUS owners (and I'd still buy monitors, possibly GPU's, gaming laptops, etc.), but if you've been building PC's for a long time and have some personal experiences yourself, most of you can probably agree with me. To be clear, I'm not saying they're bad -- just not as good as they once were.

Oh and I had the ASUS Zenfone 2 and 4, both great phones, especially considering their cost. I wasn't as concerned about security at that time, so I can't speak for security support cycles in that regard as I also wasn't keeping phones longer than three years. I am now.

 

[DS426]

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

...

Broadwell was mostly a ghost when Windows 10 launched and even afterwards, being their largest CPU paper launch in recent history. Skylake wasn't available until August 2015 while Windows 10 launched earlier in July, so... yes, this is utterly mind-blowing for me. I also have a new level of distrust and dislike for Microsoft. Sure, they didn't say anything older wouldn't work (obviously not a problem for millions of Haswell and older PC's), but that's still bonkers.

Not even cutting support in later versions like 22H2 but even the initial v1511 didn't offer support as it was indeed a total cutoff at the onset of Windows 10.

 

[rluker5]

Broadwell was mostly a ghost when Windows 10 launched and even afterwards, being their largest CPU paper launch in recent history. Skylake wasn't available until August 2015 while Windows 10 launched earlier in July, so... yes, this is utterly mind-blowing for me. I also have a new level of distrust and dislike for Microsoft. Sure, they didn't say anything older wouldn't work (obviously not a problem for millions of Haswell and older PC's), but that's still bonkers.

Not even cutting support in later versions like 22H2 but even the initial v1511 didn't offer support as it was indeed a total cutoff at the onset of Windows 10.

The desktop broadwell was a victim to reviews that saw more value in cinrbench than cache. It just didn't sell well, it was still out there, and I think mobile may have outsold mobile Haswell.

But cutting Haswell support was pretty cheap. I think Ryzen has a worse iGPU vulnerability with memory leaks and it is still unpatched afaik.