First reported by , 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 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 in March 2022, six years after its launch, while the GTX 970 was , a triple-A RPG released 10 years after the 970's launch. In , 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 —the archive page was updated in 2020, but the shows Kepler's deprecation was present from when the page first went live in 2019.
The final driver update for Kepler , 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 crashing on us like a great wave, there's still [[link]] 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 [[link]] port, making it a prize item for those in possession of holy grail CRT monitors like the blisteringly high-refresh . That's not exactly a common use case though, and even your [[link]] average will be well-served by a good adapter like the ones made by .
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