The Nvidia GeForce GTX 900 and 1000 series are considered one of the best generations of modern graphics cards. Even though the latter is nearly 10 years old (it was introduced in 2016) and it does not support fancy new tech, many users still use their GTX 1080s, 1060s, and other GPUs to play PC games. Sadly, Nvidia has some bad news: driver support for these graphics cards is ending.
Nvidia has updated its official Unix graphics feature deprecation schedule to clarify that driver 580 will be the last to support three architectures: Volta, Pascal, and Maxwell. The driver branch is shared with Windows, so the change affects Windows PCs as well.
The first post has been updated to note that the release 580 series will be the last to support GPUs based on the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures.
For those unfamiliar with Nvidia"s architecture naming, TITAN V graphics cards are based on Volta, GeForce GTX 10 Series is based on Pascal, and GeForce GTX 900 and certain 700 series cards like the 750 Ti are based on Maxwell. Note that the change does not affect the GTX 16 series, which is based on the Turing architecture. These graphics cards will continue receiving new drivers, updates, and fixes.
At this point, there is no information on when Nvidia plans to release driver branch 580 (the latest is 576.80). Therefore, if you own one of the affected graphics cards, no need to panic just yet. Besides, your beloved GTX 1080 Ti will not stop working overnight only because it can no longer download the latest driver. Also, Nvidia"s most recent driver releases (those disastrous ones) primarily focus on fixes and optimizations for much newer graphics card generations.
If you are still using a GTX 10 series graphics card, do you plan to upgrade it anytime soon? Is the end of driver support a valid enough reason for you to pull the trigger and buy a newer GPU?