Nvidia is winding down developer support for 9 and 10-series graphics cards, but they'll likely keep getting driver updates for a while yet
First reported by Tom's Hardware, the patch notes for the latest update to Nvidia's CUDA Toolkit state that support for the Maxwell and Pascall architectures—GTX 9 and 10-series cards—will be deprecated in an upcoming update. Those cards will still be getting GeForce driver updates, and while Nvidia has not yet announced for how long, we can look back at the mothballing of a previous Nvidia architecture to get an idea.
The news comes from the update 12.8 release notes for the CUDA Toolkit, Nvidia's collection of tools and libraries for programming GPU-powered applications. Under section 1.5.1, "Deprecated Architectures," the patch notes read: "Architecture support for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta is considered feature-complete and will be frozen in an upcoming release."
Volta was almost exclusively used in enterprise hardware, but Maxwell and Pascal are of dear importance to PC gamers: The 9 and 10-series cards represent a price vs. performance golden age in hindsight, with the GTX 970, 980 Ti, 1060, and 1080 Ti in particular being fondly remembered cards that could reasonably support a gaming hobby to this day, depending on what graphical and resolution compromises you're willing to make. The 1060 was still the Steam Hardware Survey's most popular GPU in March 2022, six years after its launch, while the GTX 970 was the minimum-spec GPU for Dragon Age: The Veilguard, a triple-A RPG released 10 years after the 970's launch. In December's Steam Hardware Survey, Maxwell and Pascal cards together accounted for 10.75% of respondents.
Nvidia has not revealed when driver updates will end for these cards, but I think we can look at a previous generation for an idea of the timeline we can expect. CUDA support for Kepler, the architecture behind GTX 7-series GPUs like the 780 Ti, started to be deprecated in CUDA v10.2 in November 2019—the archive page was updated in 2020, but the Wayback Machine shows Kepler's deprecation was present from when the page first went live in 2019.
The final driver update for Kepler came two years later in August 2021, so there's good reason to expect continued driver support for 9 and 10-series cards for a similar window after the CUDA deprecation. Maxwell has already outlived Kepler by more than two years in terms of CUDA support, and the large install base Maxwell and Kepler still command inclines me to believe that Nvidia will prolong their already-amazing run into 2026, if not longer.
Even with souped-up AI-powered cards like the RTX 5090 crashing on us like a great wave, there's still plenty of mileage to be gotten out of old hardware. The GTX 980 Ti remains the most powerful consumer graphics card ever released to still boast an analogue DVI port, making it a prize item for those in possession of holy grail CRT monitors like the blisteringly high-refresh Iiyama Vision Master Pro 512. That's not exactly a common use case though, and even your average CRT gaming sicko will be well-served by a good adapter like the ones made by StarTech.
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