Earlier this month, Nvidia announced the first RTX 50 series graphics cards based on its new Blackwell architecture, starting with the flagship RTX 5090. At the same time, the company is beginning to phase out support for some of its older GPU architectures.
The release notes say that CUDA support for the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta «GPU architectures is considered full-featured and will be frozen in the upcoming» release. Although all of these architectures, which collectively cover GeForce GPUs from the old GTX 700 series to the 2016 GTX 1000 series, as well as several versions for Quadro and Titan workstations, are still supported by Nvidia’s December Game Ready driver package, the discontinuation of support for new CUDA features suggests that these GPUs will eventually be removed from these driver packages in the near future.
Nvidia and AMD typically discontinue support for the next batch of architectures at the same time every few years. Nvidia last discontinued support for older graphics cards in 2021, and AMD discontinued support for several well-known GPUs in 2023. Both companies maintain a separate driver branch for some of their older cards, but releases usually only occur every few months and are focused on security updates rather than providing new features or performance optimizations for new games.
The Maxwell and Pascal architectures were the basis of several graphics cards that were once very important and popular. These include the Maxwell-based GeForce GTX 750 Ti, which was widely known for keeping up with AMD cards that consumed twice as much power. Also noteworthy was the Pascal-based GeForce GTX 1060, which was the most popular video card model in the Steam Hardware Survey for over 5 years. Now the GTX 1060 is still ranked 12th, higher than any GPU of any model or age from AMD or Intel.
Source: arstechnica