Graphics cards don’t live forever, as either faulty silicon or lack of software support forces them into the great beyond. Nvidia has decided the time has come for several GPU families to face the latter scenario, as the company announces plans to cease driver development for GTX 10, 900, and 700 Series.
On July 1, Nvidia updated the ‘Unix graphics feature depreciation schedule’ post on its developer forums. The changelog, maintained by moderator ‘aplattner’, states that the update solely includes a “note that the release of 580 series will be the last to support GPUs based on the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures.”
By ‘580 series’, Nvidia is referring to drivers that fall under that version number. For the moment, the latest Game Ready driver is 576.80, so the affected graphics cards should still receive several months worth of updates. If this decision affects your graphics card, I’d strongly suggest planning your next upgrade sooner rather than later.
These GPU families account for at least 7.58% of Steam’s player base, at the time of writing. While the majority of these graphics cards make up less than 1% of the user base, examples like GTX 1060 and GTX 1050 Ti remain popular and account for 2.17% and 1.67%, respectively. These percentages may sound small but translate to millions of gamers.
This isn’t the end of the road for GTX, though, as 16 Series cards aren’t caught in this crossfire. It’s easy to forget but that family shares the same Turing architecture as RTX 20 Series sans ray tracing support. However, they’ll undoubtedly be next on the chopping block before the decade’s out.
I have fond memories of both my GTX 970 and 1070, which each served me faithfully for many years before I made the jump to RTX. Nostalgia only carries these cards so far, though, and I’m not sure I’d want to go back to a time where I couldn’t use Nvidia DLSS. That’s not forgetting ray traced effects, of course, as the likes of Cyberpunk 2077 and Half-Life 2 RTX continue to dazzle me.
For those in need of assistance with identifying suitable replacements for their ageing graphics cards, I’d suggest giving my GeForce RTX 5060 and Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB reviews a read. Nvidia has just launched its RTX 5050 but we’re yet to test its mettle. Right now, I’d sooner steer you in the direction of Arc B580.
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