NVIDIA Is Ending Driver Support For GeForce GTX 1080 Ti And These Other GPUs
The note simply says "Support for Maxwell-, Pascal-, and Volta-based GPUs: The release 580 series will be the last to support GPUs based on the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures." Release 580 series should be the next major release of NVIDIA's graphics drivers, as the current driver revision is driver 576.88. There may be additional small updates before and during Release 580, but once we hit that number, the end is nigh.
These chips have had a damn good run. Maxwell, originally introduced with the GeForce GTX 750 and 750 TIi offered nearly a 2x improvement in energy efficiency for gaming over the previous generation Kepler architecture despite being on the same fabrication process. That's the same architecture used in the original Nintendo Switch, and if you need any evidence of its capability, just look at what developers pulled off using the particularly dinky little Maxwell GPU built into the Tegra X1 SOC that powers the Switch.
Pascal, the follow-up to Maxwell, brought along another major generational upgrade thanks to the long-awaited move from 28nm fabrication down to 16nm. Pascal didn't bring along a lot of major architectural upgrades over Maxwell, but the one-two punch of bigger GPUs (such as the GTX 1080 Ti that we mentioned in the headline) built on a smaller fabrication process brought another huge leap in performance. Pascal and the GTX 10 series also introduced the now familiar Founder's Edition branding.
The very cynical might note that Team Green has been struggling to get PC gamers off of its previous generation GPUs and onto RTX, and then remark that this driver deprecation is simply the next step in that process. That's reaching, though; the simple fact of the matter is that these GPUs are old now. The GeForce GTX 750 Ti came out in early 2014. It's eleven years old at this point; it's long past time to put these parts out to pasture.
With that said, it may be a bit yet before that happens. As we noted above, the 580 series will still have support for these GPUs—It will simply be the last driver branch with that support. Even then, It's not as if the final driver is going to magically stop working once NVIDIA declines to ship any further updates for those cards. Frankly, it's pretty unlikely that the GPU vendor has shipped any real driver updates for Maxwell or Pascal in the last few years anyway.
If you're still rocking one of these cards, you may want to consider an upgrade to something more modern, if only because a newer GPU with the same or better performance will consume considerably less power. In fact, there are integrated GPUs available now that can far outstrip a GTX 1060, much less an old 750 Ti. Of course, if you're still holding on to hardware of this vintage, it's probably time for a whole new machine.
