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
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49 Comments on NVIDIA Likely Sending Maxwell, Pascal & Volta Architectures to CUDA Legacy Branch

#26
Waldorf
@TheinsanegamerN
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.
Posted on Reply
#27
R-T-B
lexluthermiesterTrue, but it's time of support thing. How long will it be before Windows 11 starts complaining about older drivers?... Even if they just slap a fresh date code into the driver sig, that would be enough.


I'm one of them. I still have an use Pascal based cards in my home and yes I have a problem with NVidia dropping support for cards that still run great.


I expect NVidia to continue supporting cards that are still in common use and still perform well.
They are still getting security updates at least for now, so doubtful that'll happen in the window of this cards relevance.
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#28
chrcoluk
Which drivers are required for the new transformer DLSS 4?
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#29
igormp
igormpI find Pascal and Maxwell being throw in there fair, but I do find it weird that Volta was shoved in there as well, given that it was the first gen with tensor core support.
Oh, I just remembered that Volta lacks the GSP, so that may be why it's getting the boot. It's not even supported by Nvidia's open source module because of that.
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#30
Jonny5isalivetm5
Im not in a big rush to upgrade as I got a 1080ti few years ago for ultra bargain and with the current ripoff ngreedia charge I might be keeping my "Dinosaur" for awhile yet ^_^

Order date: 09 Sep, 2022
Order total: £115.00

I only play a few games anyway so Indiana Jones can go do one :D
Posted on Reply
#31
lexluthermiester
Jonny5isalivetm5Im not in a big rush to upgrade as I got a 1080ti few years ago for ultra bargain and with the current ripoff ngreedia charge I might be keeping my "Dinosaur" for awhile yet ^_^

Order date: 09 Sep, 2022
Order total: £115.00

I only play a few games anyway so Indiana Jones can go do one :D
You'de be surprised how many modern games still run on a 1080ti. Hell, my 1070ti and 1080 still work well.
Posted on Reply
#32
Lycanwolfen
lexluthermiesterYou'de be surprised how many modern games still run on a 1080ti. Hell, my 1070ti and 1080 still work well.
Yep and I myself with twin 1080ti's still in Sli run very well at 4k, It's actually amazing I can even makes games look like they are using RTX using reshade me post processing. Games look surreal and no performance hits.
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#33
lexluthermiester
LycanwolfenYep and I myself with twin 1080ti's still in Sli run very well at 4k
Wow! Nice.
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#35
R-T-B
Yeah my brother was using a plain 1080 for 1080p gaming until just recently. According to him, it aged pretty damn well, and he'd still be using it had it not went kaput (VRM failure, an eventuality for all these old cards I guess).
Posted on Reply
#36
_roman_
Waldorfconsidering ~50% of global gamers are on 720/1080, i assume its gonna be a few ppl that stuff older than rtx2xxx
I used for a few months early 2023 an used Nvidia 960 GTX with 4GB VRAM. That card was utterly trash. Double display initialisation in windows which implies waiting 5 seconds longer to use the windows desktop at bootup. To make it clear, that was two years ago with my B550 Mainboard and ryzen 3 3100 most likely or maybe with the 5800X. I sold graphic card / cpu and swapped for trash parts before selling everything.

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.
R0H1TWell then, don't cry about AMD's driver support, or lack thereof, since Nvidia cut everything pre-Sep (?) 2018 off now! So less than 7 years.
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.
Posted on Reply
#37
Zazigalka
Too early fot Titan V
R0H1TWell then, don't cry about AMD's driver support, or lack thereof, since Nvidia cut everything pre-Sep (?) 2018 off now! So less than 7 years.
they're cutting CUDA support for applications, not gameready driver support.
Posted on Reply
#38
Vayra86
lexluthermiesterMaxwell? Sure, it's time. Pascal? Hell no, it's still relevant and useful. WTF @ NVidia?


That's an opinion, not one that people still using and enjoying their Pascal based cards are going to agree with.
Why? The drivers are done, there is nothing they need and newest games will not run well on these cards either. They lack feature support so what are you gonna update?
Posted on Reply
#39
R-T-B
Zazigalkathey're cutting CUDA support for applications, not gameready driver support.
It's being moved to legacy branch, which means security updates only.

No, it's not a complete lack of support, but expecting the same "game-ready" support is not whats happening.
Posted on Reply
#40
lexluthermiester
Vayra86The drivers are done, there is nothing they need
Continued optimizations would not go amiss.
Vayra86and newest games will not run well on these cards either.
That's not true at all. I can and have run a few of the latest games on my 1070ti and 1080. Performance is acceptable at worst and still very good in many cases. For the record, Stalker2 runs very decently on a 1070ti @1080p with some settings turned down as does Indiana Jones. Pascal is still a viable set of GPU's, even if older.

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.
Posted on Reply
#41
Vayra86
lexluthermiesterContinued optimizations would not go amiss.

That's not true at all. I can and have run a few of the latest games on my 1070ti and 1080. Performance is acceptable at worst and still very good in many cases. For the record, Stalker2 run very decently on a 1070ti @1080p with some settings turned down as does Indiana Jones. Pascal is still a viable set of GPU's, even if older.

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.
What optimizations? Its not like games ran or ever run radically different on a game ready driver. That only happens if the original experience is just not stable. I have yet to find the first game that started running better on my GTX 1080 across its seven year presence in my PC. I'm not sure what you are expecting here for games that already have to run on older DX modes. Games that run, run. No support required. A very small selection wants a specific driver tweak to accompany a developer collaboration - well they ain't happening on recent games for DX11 compatibility modes, you can rest assured.

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.
Posted on Reply
#42
Jonny5isalivetm5
lexluthermiesterContinued optimizations would not go amiss.

That's not true at all. I can and have run a few of the latest games on my 1070ti and 1080. Performance is acceptable at worst and still very good in many cases. For the record, Stalker2 run very decently on a 1070ti @1080p with some settings turned down as does Indiana Jones. Pascal is still a viable set of GPU's, even if older.

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.
I take it you dont mean the latest indie game as its "requires" Ray Tracing garbo..
Posted on Reply
#43
lexluthermiester
Vayra86but I really do not see the purpose in continued support
Many of us disagree. We should leave it at that.
Jonny5isalivetm5I take it you dont mean the latest indie game as its "requires" Ray Tracing garbo..
No. I'm meaning anything that does not require RTRT.
Posted on Reply
#44
Waldorf
@_roman_
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.
Posted on Reply
#45
TheinsanegamerN
lexluthermiesterI'm one of them. I still have an use Pascal based cards in my home and yes I have a problem with NVidia dropping support for cards that still run great.
OK, so what doesnt run on your GPU today? What CUDA workloads dont work on your 1080ti?
lexluthermiesterI expect NVidia to continue supporting cards that are still in common use and still perform well.
So at what point do your expect support to end? 12 years? 15? Should nvidia continue putting out CUDA support for Fermi? Tesla? What is "common" use defined as? 1% of the market? 5%? 10%?

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.
Waldorf@TheinsanegamerN
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.
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.
Waldorfmy 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.
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.
Posted on Reply
#46
Macro Device
chrcolukWhich drivers are required for the new transformer DLSS 4?
I don't see how this is relevant because:
1. They had been released for all 2014+ nVidia GPUs;
2. Non-RTX GPUs don't support DLSS anyway.
Posted on Reply
#47
Vayra86
lexluthermiesterMany of us disagree. We should leave it at that.
Its not very concrete what you're saying is it. What are you missing, what isn't working? When IS long enough to you?
Posted on Reply
#48
GodisanAtheist
IMO it should be codified and up front whatever the support timeframe is for these cards.

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.
Posted on Reply
#49
Waldorf
@TheinsanegamerN
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.
Posted on Reply
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