Friday, January 24th 2025
NVIDIA Likely Sending Maxwell, Pascal & Volta Architectures to CUDA Legacy Branch
Team Green's CUDA 12.8 release notes have revealed upcoming changes for three older GPU architectures—the document's "Deprecated and Dropped Features" section outlines forthcoming changes. A brief sentence outlines a less active future for affected families: "architecture support for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta is considered feature-complete and will be frozen in an upcoming release." Further down, NVIDIA states that a small selection of operating systems have been dropped from support lists, including Microsoft Windows 10 21H2 and Debian 11.
Refocusing on matters of hardware—Michael Larabel, Phoronix's editor-in-chief, has kindly provided a bit of history and context. "Four years ago with the NVIDIA 470 series was the legacy branch for GeForce GTX 600 and 700 Kepler series and now as we embark on the NVIDIA 570 driver series, it looks like it could end up being the legacy branch for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta generations of GPUs." Larabel and other industry watchdogs reckon that the incoming "Blackwell" generation is taking priority, with Team Green likely freeing up resources and concentrating less on taking care of decade+ old hardware. VideoCardz believes that gaming GPU support will continue—at least for Maxwell (e.g. GeForce GTX 900) and Pascal (GeForce GTX 10 series)—based on a playtesting of the toolkit's latest set of integrated drivers (version 571.96).
Sources:
Phoronix, VideoCardz, NVIDIA Docs
Refocusing on matters of hardware—Michael Larabel, Phoronix's editor-in-chief, has kindly provided a bit of history and context. "Four years ago with the NVIDIA 470 series was the legacy branch for GeForce GTX 600 and 700 Kepler series and now as we embark on the NVIDIA 570 driver series, it looks like it could end up being the legacy branch for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta generations of GPUs." Larabel and other industry watchdogs reckon that the incoming "Blackwell" generation is taking priority, with Team Green likely freeing up resources and concentrating less on taking care of decade+ old hardware. VideoCardz believes that gaming GPU support will continue—at least for Maxwell (e.g. GeForce GTX 900) and Pascal (GeForce GTX 10 series)—based on a playtesting of the toolkit's latest set of integrated drivers (version 571.96).
26 Comments on NVIDIA Likely Sending Maxwell, Pascal & Volta Architectures to CUDA Legacy Branch
Pascal has been available since 2016, 9 years old
Volta is 8, but a very limited availability architecture since only the Titan V ever released to consumers and that was the cheapest part with this architecture at $3000
Ultimately the people who will get hit the worst are the GTX 1080 Ti diehards.
Same applies to the professional use.
*angry screeching noises*
But Volta is 95% the same as GTX 1600 series, it just doesn't support few features from DX12 Ultimate (that are separate from RT itself). It's a bit sad to see it go like this, especially since it does have Tensor cores :/ (note : they can't be used for DLSS though... not sure why)
rhetorical question: you gonna give ppl the money?
doesnt matter if its 100 or 500 (add your currency), if you dont have it (to spend on a gpu), you dont have it no matter how good an upgrade is.
My point stands: no matter the driver support GTX 1080 Ti doesn't run the newest games well. Some won't launch at all. Wanna play these games, you're forced to buy a newer and stronger GPU anyway. You're completely free to play older games where 1080 Ti is still fine, not my call. And not like you need newer drivers to run them FWIW.
e.g. if a game wont run (outside of perf, which you might negate thru lower res/settings) just because you have older hw, thats just crappy.
considering ~50% of global gamers are on 720/1080, i assume its gonna be a few ppl that stuff older than rtx2xxx
'twas leagues worse to have an old GPU back in a day. GPUs made in 1999 almost entirely fail to run games from 2003 onwards because they don't have any hardware and firmware to deal with new features. Today, we have GPUs from 2018 successfully running everything, sometimes with ultra bad performance but they launch these games at the very least.
The other number is ~6.5 years for the first Turing cards; that number will obviously grow, as it would probably be supported for another 2-4 more years.
Nvidia Titan V CEO Edition June 21, 2018
NVIDIA Unveils & Gives Away New Limited Edition 32GB Titan V "CEO Edition"
About 6 years ago, considering it's still January. But it's okay to let it go. :rolleyes:
Also, since no one else is gonna do it... Poor Volta!