NVIDIA has announced that it will soon stop providing driver updates for several older generations of its graphics cards, including the GTX 700, 900, and 1000 series. The change will take effect once the company releases its 580-series drivers, which are expected to arrive before the end of this year.
The affected GPUs, based on NVIDIA’s Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures, are between 8 and 11 years old today. The GTX 700 and 900 series (Maxwell) and GTX 1000 series (Pascal) will receive their final official updates in the 580-series driver release. After that, no further optimizations, bug fixes, or security patches will be issued for these cards.
NVIDIA has already ended driver support for even older generations, such as the Fermi (GTX 500) and Kepler (GTX 600) series. The company typically phases out updates for aging hardware to focus on newer technologies.
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While the exact release date for the 580-series drivers has not been confirmed, NVIDIA is currently on the 570-series, which launched alongside its latest RTX 50-series GPUs. Once the 580 drivers arrive, users with Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs may still receive minor updates within that branch for a few months before support is fully stopped.
For owners of these older cards, this means that while their GPUs will continue to function, they will no longer benefit from performance improvements or compatibility fixes for future games and software.
NVIDIA has not yet commented on whether critical security updates will still be provided beyond the 580-series drivers, but historically, the company has not extended support once a generation is officially discontinued.
Source: NVIDIA