NVIDIA has officially confirmed that the future series of drivers numbered 580 will be the last to support three of its old graphic processor architectures. The information, initially appeared in an update of the depreciation calendar for UNIX systems, will also concern Windows users due to the unified code base of the manufacturer’s drivers.
This decision will put an end to the new performance optimizations and security fixes for the GTX 700 and GTX 900 (Maxwell architecture) ranges cards, the popular GeForce GTX 10 series (Pascal) as well as the Titan V (Volta).
The GeForce GTX 16 are not affected
Important point to note, the graphics cards based on the Turing architecture, such as the GeForce GTX of the series 16, are not impacted by this end of support. They will continue to receive updates beyond version 580, allowing players to benefit from the latest optimizations and stability improvements.
Nvidia justifies this decision by the need for its teams of engineers to focus on more recent material platforms. Launched between 2014 and 2017, Maxwell, Pascal and Volta architectures will have benefited from an official maintenance period from eight to eleven, one of the longest in the industry.
What consequences for players?
Concretely, for users of video games, this means that there will be no more “Game Ready” drivers for upcoming video games. New releases could therefore suffer from degraded performance, graphic bugs (artifacts, instability) or refuse to launch properly. If the current games will continue to operate with the latest driver available, they will not receive any correction in the event of a problem occurring after an update of the game itself. In short, if these graphics cards do not become unusable overnight, their ability to operate new products in good conditions will gradually decline.
What follow -up for users?
If the already installed pilots will of course remain functional, NVIDIA recommends that users who depend on these old cards to start planning an upgrade to maintain full compatibility and access new features. To date, the public version of the pilots is 576.80. NVIDIA has not yet set a precise release date for the 580 series, which leaves the users concerned with a window of several months before the support continues officially.
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