Nvidia Dropping Driver Support for Older Graphics Cards
A whole heap of older Nvidia graphics cards are going to lose driver support.
Nvidia has announced that it is going to be dropping driver support for a large number of its old graphics cards, including essentially the entire 8-series, 9-series, 100-series, 200-series, 300-series, and one card (the GeForce 405) from its 400-series. This includes mobile and desktop products. Support for a number of professional workstation products is also being terminated.
Up to and including the release of the GeForce 340, driver users will still be getting driver and game optimizations; however, after this, the party is over. Up until the GeForce 343 driver in 2016, the company will still be fixing minor driver issues as needed, but these are likely to affect only a small group of people.
Don't be scared if you're still sporting one of those graphics cards, though. You'll still be able to keep using it long after the driver support stops; you just won't be getting any new drivers.
The entire list of products can be found here on Nvidia's website. Are you still using a card among them?
You make it sound like the cards will suddenly stop working.
Given how quickly things change in this industry I think it is a little unrealistic to expect driver support for what, going on almost a decade now? Given what a drain it can be to maintain backwards compatibility I'm surprised they did it for as long as they did. Off the top of my head, I can't think of very many other hardware components you can get from 10 years ago where the manufacturer is still putting out driver updates.
And of course, looking at it strictly from a business standpoint, anyone still running a 8800GT in their main rig isn't their target consumer anyway. I mean yea I guess they could say "I'll never buy from them again!!!", but these people weren't buying from them (or anyone) anyway.
You make it sound like the cards will suddenly stop working.
Given how quickly things change in this industry I think it is a little unrealistic to expect driver support for what, going on almost a decade now? Given what a drain it can be to maintain backwards compatibility I'm surprised they did it for as long as they did. Off the top of my head, I can't think of very many other hardware components you can get from 10 years ago where the manufacturer is still putting out driver updates.
And of course, looking at it strictly from a business standpoint, anyone still running a 8800GT in their main rig isn't their target consumer anyway. I mean yea I guess they could say "I'll never buy from them again!!!", but these people weren't buying from them (or anyone) anyway.