It looks like the writing is on the wall for the Nvidia Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPU architectures. According to an official Nvidia Unix graphics feature deprecation schedule, driver branch 580 will be the last to include support for these architectures (h/t Longhorn on X). For consumers, that means the 580 drivers will be the last to deliver updates that address the GeForce GTX 900 and legendary GTX 1000 series of graphics cards. As Nvidia maintains a unified driver codebase, it looks pretty certain that this Unix schedule will also apply to Windows drivers.
The key statement of intent from the updated schedule is as follows: “The release 580 series will be the last to support GPUs based on the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures.” Though it looks pretty certain to apply to Windows, too, we have reached out to Nvidia to remove any doubt regarding the support for GTX 900 and GTX 1000 cards on Windows. The company wasn't immediately available for comment.
GTX consigned to history, almost
Quite remarkably, when the day comes and Nvidia moves onto the 590 driver branch, support for the storied GTX line will have almost come to an end. The next gen facing the chopping block would be the Turing architecture GPUs, also known as the RTX 20 series. However, some GTX cards based on Turing were also produced and proved quite popular among budget buyers.
Owners of graphics cards from the GTX 16 series, based on Turing GPUs, will have the dubious honor of rocking the last supported GTX graphics cards from Nvidia. That means popular cards like the GTX 1660 Super will continue to get driver support into the 590 drivers era, and probably beyond.
The last time Nvidia gave notice that it was killing off support for a graphics architecture was back in 2021. As we reported at the time, the 470 drivers were the last to support graphics cards based on the Kepler architecture. These you might know better as the GeForce GTX 600 and GTX 700 series graphics cards for consumers. Despite the lack of mainline updates, Nvidia still went on to deliver some subsequent updates for security patching purposes.
The latest Nvidia GeForce driver at the time of writing is version 576.80 WHQL, so we haven’t reached the 580 series drivers yet.
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