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).
49 Comments on NVIDIA Likely Sending Maxwell, Pascal & Volta Architectures to CUDA Legacy Branch
because atm i have zero income, in form of money.
ignoring this does not mean i sleep on the street or dont know what to eat tomorrow.
my problem is Nv charged a lot to ppl buying (decent) RTX, upper 3 digits prices should get you some support (vs say 1040).
and like Lex said, its not always about supporting the latest game or lack thereof, which im not concerned with, as i didnt see anything worth spending 60-100$ on (even if i had it).
besides, siege for example, isnt new, but they still added stuff like vulcan/reflex later, and the next time (this or other games), it might be an issue without newer driver.
Order date: 09 Sep, 2022
Order total: £115.00
I only play a few games anyway so Indiana Jones can go do one :D
Subnautica had it's issues in whqd wiht the worst settings. Framerate was around 15-20 FPS. Stuff popping up slowly one after another.
I tested a few of my free epic games. Games are more demanding as I expected before that point.
Well, if you say, or claim people can play with a 960. Go on - have fun.
That encased game from epic game store looks like not demanding. That is a pain to play with the Ryzen 7600X cpu graphics with 16GiB from the DRAM only for the cpu graphics. Well that is nvidia way. I had also to use legacy drivers for my nvidia 660m GTX in my ASUS G75VW notebook. Legacy nvidia drivers in gnu gentoo linux was a hassle
6 or 7 years is the usual nvidia way to declare "legacy graphic card".
edit: you buy hardware. You buy software. only a selected few packages even support cuda. I think less than 10 packages of over 1400 packages here have a cuda feature. I saw no difference with or without a cuda feature cards in the past 19 years. Software is not better or faster in gnu linux at least. It is an useless feature for a desktop gnu linux user. I had several mobile nvidia graphic cards and one desktop nvidia card.
No, it's not a complete lack of support, but expecting the same "game-ready" support is not whats happening.
My main concern is microsoft's continued nitwit hardware limitation behaviors transitioning in to the driver arena. It's pathetic narrow-minded behaviour that NVidia needs to rise above and actively stand against.
Fact is these GPUs were already hardware limited by DX feature levels and they always have been, so limitation is in full effect as it was since DX12 Ultimate ;) A fact known since Maxwell.
I'm not vouching for Nvidia here or anything, but I really do not see the purpose in continued support.
never mentioned specific cards, nor what hw the ppl with 720/1080p screens are using, just that its almost the biggest share of garners, and i doubt they all play CS go, to be using 720p res.
ignoring not everyone is same age or even plays the same games, my friends 10y doesnt need a 4060ti to run fortnite.
during my siege time when 1xxx came out, a lot switched to 1060/70/80/Ti, almost all of them still run it, and i doubt its because ppl dont want to upgrade...
and to say ppl dont use cuda might be true for linux, not so much with those running win.
encoding of a 90min video: 2080S needs sub 8min, cpu +1.5h.
yeah, completely useless.
There have been architectural and API advancements since 2016. It's silly to expect nVidia to hold back new updates and features because they need to support cards from 10+ years ago. I liked my 550tis back in the day but I wouldnt expect to run the newest battlefield on them, or run AI workloads or the like. Well, I'm sorry to hear that, but this proves my point, if you have zero money coming in, zilch, nada, not even from welfare, then you probably shouldn't be playing PC games. If you want longer support lifetimes, you will need to pay more money OR a subscription for updates. Those optimizations and support dont come for free, they are baked into the GPU purchase price.
1. They had been released for all 2014+ nVidia GPUs;
2. Non-RTX GPUs don't support DLSS anyway.
IMO 6 years (3 generations of cards) seems like a broadly fair metric for actual performance support, and 8 years (4 gens of cards) for security updates etc.
Ofc this is based on historicals where there were radical shifts in architecture in these time-frames. Going forward, we may start seeing arch/process/performance stagnation and the expectation would be for 8 years of performance/10 years security updates.
Whatever it is, it should be planned and disclosed upfront so you're not rolling the dice when you buy.
what has that fact that i dont have any monetary income, with anything to besides purchasing hw?
ignoring im talking about games i already own (for years).
your assuming i dont work, as you mentioned welfare, which even if it were the case, still has no bearing on what i can/or shouldnt do in my free time.
and no, doesnt proof your point at all.
so then let me ask this, if the "support" length is baked into gpu purchase, my almost 900$ 2080S should have support like a 740GT or a 1030?
right.
feel free to answer to this, i wont anymore.