An update to Nvidia's official "Unix graphics feature deprecation schedule" has been spotted on Reddit. Long story short, the next 580 series of Unix GPU drivers will be the last to fully support Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures. So, what does this actually mean for gamers? For instance, does it imply that the days are numbered for driver support for those GPUs in Windows?
Firstly, Maxwell encompasses GeForce GTX 7 and 9 Series, while Pascal is the architecture on which GTX 10 Series graphics cards were based. Note that the likes of the GTX 1650 and GTX 1660 are actually based on the newer Turing architecture, which isn't included in this deprecation.
Volta is essentially an enterprise-only architecture, so not gaming relevant. Meanwhile, "Unix" in this context is a catch all for a broader family of operating systems that includes Linux, as per this official Nvidia archive of Unix drivers.
So, the immediate question is what this means for owners of those older GPUs gaming on Windows. Our understanding is that both Windows and Unix drivers are based on the same underlying driver branches (though numbered differently) and that what applies to the Unix fork will also apply to Windows.
That being the case, the Windows equivalent to the Unix 580 series drivers would be the last for GTX 10, 9 and 7 GPUs. The current Windows driver series is 576, with the first 576 driver released in April. These major driver forks tend to prevail for around two to four months with anywhere from a single point release, to five or six point releases.
By way of example, there have been six versions of the 576 fork, with 576.80 released on June 17 the most recent. There's a good chance, then, that the next driver release from Nvidia will be a new fork, that it will be related to the Unix 580 fork and thus be the last to have full feature support for those Maxwell and Pascal GPUs. If so, that will likely mean the last driver with support for GTX 10, 9 and 7 Series graphics cards will arrive towards the end of 2025.
Even after full support ends, you can still expect driver releases for major security flaw fixes. But owners of those older GPUs won't be included in the "Game Ready" optimisations for the latest major game releases.
That, at least, is the assumption for now with the next major Windows driver release from Nvidia. We'll be watching carefully when the next driver fork lands. In the meantime, it's worth noting that the newest of the two GPU families, Pascal, was announced in May 2016 and thus is over nine years ago.
Nvidia cannot support all legacy GPU architectures forever, and AMD's Adrenalin drivers only cover RDNA-based chips from the past six years, but exactly when it's reasonable to begin tapering driver support is a subjective question. But the better part of 10 years for Pascal and over 10 years for Maxwell, which was first released in February 2014, doesn't seem too stingy.
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