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

[T0@st]

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).



View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source

 

[Sir Beregond]

Time flies really. I was using my GTX 980 I bought in winter of 2014 up until 2022. Also have a Maxwell Titan X around.

 

[Dr. Dro]

Maxwell has been available since 2014: 11 years old
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.

 

[Macro Device]

GTX 1080 Ti diehards.

They don't need discontinued driver support to get hit, this GPU doesn't run any RTX-only title and gets slapped hard in games made with DX12_2 in mind. About time to let it go. Not like similar performance cost a lot of money, no, 3 hundred buys you a better GPU no matter the colour you choose.

Same applies to the professional use.

 

[Dr. Dro]

They don't need discontinued driver support to get hit, this GPU doesn't run any RTX-only title and gets slapped hard in games made with DX12_2 in mind. About time to let it go. Not like similar performance cost a lot of money, no, 3 hundred buys you a better GPU no matter the colour you choose.

Same applies to the professional use.

I agree, but every time this is brought up...

*angry screeching noises*

 

[agent_x007]

I can understand Paxwell going away (both are pretty much the same, one just clocks WAY higher, has newer VRAM tech and few things were further optimized inside).
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)

 

[freeagent]

Good run.

 

[dgianstefani]

Not unreasonable to send everything pre RTX to legacy branch.

 

[Waldorf]

@Macro Device
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.

 

[Macro Device]

you dont have it no matter how good an upgrade is.

I too would've loved to live in a world where nothing costs money and I only need to be a semi-decent person to deserve all the goods and my whatever PC part never becomes obsolete. But for some reason, we live in the real world.

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.

 

[Waldorf]

sure, but i know if it was something else, in similar price range, i guess less ppl would argue the same way.
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

 

[Macro Device]

just because you have older hw

It's not just that. We had inventions all the time the GPUs as a concept existed. Pixel shaders, vortex stuff, DX8, DX9, Vulkan, you name it. Sometimes there was a way to emulate new technologies on older hardware but it usually was really hard to translate to legacy language without losing too much performance. Just like I don't have a clue how to read Chinese, these GPUs don't have a clue how to run RT and whatnot. Sure, you might google translate those but this, firstly, ruins the performance, and secondly, you're mad at scientists for trying to create something better than we have today. And whereas I, theoretically, can learn Chinese, you can't "teach" old hardware these new tricks. C'est la vie.

'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.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Maxwell? Sure, it's time. Pascal? Hell no, it's still relevant and useful. WTF @ NVidia?

Not unreasonable to send everything pre RTX to legacy branch.

That's an opinion, not one that people still using and enjoying their Pascal based cards are going to agree with.

 

[R0H1T]

I agree, but every time this is brought up.

Well 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.

 

[R-T-B]

Maxwell? 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.

I dunno, not like the drivers for pascal aren't completely functional...

 

[Macro Device]

Pascal? Hell no, it's still relevant and useful

I seriously doubt Pascal users are really upset they don't get drivers for forced RT games they won't be able to enjoy 7 outta 10 cases (with 3 being -dx11 or DXVK, or whatever compatibility crutch that'll show you damaged image and very questionable framerates). To date, it's millions of video games you still can play using "outdated" drivers just fine. Most upcoming titles that don't use DX12_2 and beyond will also be playable even without you updating the drivers, either ('least I "played" some of those on my R9 380 that doesn't get drivers since late '22). Supporting an ancient arch is consumer friendly but this time, at least 99.999999% is covered. They don't need to provide anything more for this one.

 

[freeagent]

Half way to retro now haha.

 

[amit_talkin]

About time to let it go.

Damn this hits hard!! ... sob

 

[Dr. Dro]

Well 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.

The absolute newest of these is Titan V, released 2017. It's 8 to 11 years old hardware. Not barely 5-6.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

Maxwell? Sure, it's time. Pascal? Hell no, it's still relevant and useful. WTF @ NVidia?

Pascal is 9 years old. unless you're paying for them, do you still expect new CUDA support on them?

That's an opinion, not one that people still using and enjoying their Pascal based cards are going to agree with.

And they can continue to use them for all their legacy use cases they are doing right now. They wont stop working. You're just not getting new updates on a card from 9 years ago.

@Macro Device
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.

If you bought pascal 9 years ago and couldn't save $33 a year since then for a replacement today, doing PC stuff should be the absolute least of your concerns, frankly.

 

[igormp]

I 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.

 

[R0H1T]

The absolute newest of these is Titan V, released 2017. It's 8 to 11 years old hardware. Not barely 5-6.

Titan V is not a gaming card.

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.

 

[Denver]

The absolute newest of these is Titan V, released 2017. It's 8 to 11 years old hardware. Not barely 5-6.

Quadro GV100 on March 27, 2018
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.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Not unreasonable to send everything pre RTX to legacy branch.

- Hmmmm so GTX 1660Ti on down get the boot too eh?

Also, since no one else is gonna do it... Poor Volta!

 

[Dr. Dro]

Quadro GV100 on March 27, 2018
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.

That's taking nitpicking to the absolute extreme, Quadro GV100 is a late release professional product (remember, the GP100 existed as well and was the product for this segment throughout 2017), and the JHH Titan V was never sold. Only 20 were ever made, and these were all personally gifted by Jensen to its recipients. Can't reasonably count that as a "launch" when it's more of a signature gift.

- Hmmmm so GTX 1660Ti on down get the boot too eh?

Also, since no one else is gonna do it... Poor Volta!

No, GTX 16 series are Turing and even though they have always been treated as second class products (which, being frank, they are), there is no reason to discontinue them at this moment in time.