Nvidia to drop driver support for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs

In a nutshell: As Nvidia continues to release driver updates at an accelerated pace, even well-established gaming hardware will eventually struggle to keep up. A pending update will end official support for three GPU architectures, though the affected cards won't stop working immediately.

Nvidia has just confirmed that the upcoming 580 series of display drivers will be the last to support GPUs based on the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta microarchitectures. After the 580 release, a significant number of older GeForce cards will no longer receive bug fixes or potential – though unlikely – code optimizations.

The Santa Clara – based company announced the news through its Unix graphics feature deprecation schedule, which provides guidance for GeForce users on Linux and other Unix-based operating systems. The change will also impact Windows users, although it may take a few more driver branches to fully take effect in that ecosystem.

Even after official support ends, users can expect an additional year of critical security updates.

Still, ending support for three GPU architectures at once is a notable move, even for Nvidia. The Volta architecture powered the high-end Titan V card released in 2017, while Pascal was best known for its use in the GeForce 10 series from 2016.

Maxwell is a name few PC gamers remember today, as the architecture debuted in 2014 with the GeForce GTX 750. Even now, some users are still seeking advice on hardware forums after finally deciding to retire their "beloved" GeForce GTX 1080 or 1080 Ti in favor of a more modern GPU.

I had my fair share of Pascal fun with a mobile GeForce GTX 1060 GPU back in 2017, when that card was good enough to run the 2016 Doom remake at a steady 80 – 120 FPS in Full HD. Next time I pull my old gaming laptop out of the closet, I'll see if the same hardware can manage Elden Ring at 30 frames per second.

Nvidia has yet to provide any details about the scheduled release of the 580 driver series. The company is currently focused on rapid iterations of newer drivers, as the last few Game Ready releases have caused headaches for owners of both the latest (50 series) and previous-gen (40 series) GeForce GPUs.

My GeForce RTX 4080 Super-equipped PC is still happily purring along with the 566.36 Game Ready driver, and I don't plan to update it anytime soon. After all, the setup is "good enough" to run Doom: The Dark Ages at a steady 1440p 100+ FPS with DLSS Quality, and without relying on AI frame generation.