NVIDIA has officially ended support for its Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPU architectures in the latest CUDA 12.8 update. While there is no mention of discontinuing gaming drivers, this move is often a precursor to phasing out overall support for older GPUs.
What This Means for Users
- The CUDA 12.8 changelog states that feature development for these architectures is now complete and will be frozen in the next patch.
- Existing CUDA functionalities will continue to work, but no new features or optimizations will be added for these GPUs.
- While gaming drivers remain unaffected for now, driver support for Maxwell and Pascal GPUs will likely be discontinued in the future.
Impacted GPU Series
- Maxwell (GTX 900 series)
- Pascal (GTX 10 series, some Quadro and Tesla models)
- Volta (some high-end data center GPUs like Tesla V100)
Users who rely on these GPUs for AI, deep learning, or professional workloads may need to upgrade to newer architectures like Ampere (RTX 30) or Ada Lovelace (RTX 40) to continue receiving CUDA improvements.
GTX 1080 IT will be forgotten
Nvidia’s Maxwell architecture powered GPUs from the GeForce GTX 700 and 900 series, while Pascal architecture was used in the GTX 10 series. This means that support for GPUs ranging from the GTX 750 to the GTX 1080 Ti—the last flagship model before the RTX series debuted—has now officially ended regarding Nvidia’s latest toolkit updates.
The Volta architecture was unique in that it only produced one consumer GPU: the Titan V. With an impressive 110 TFLOPs of performance, it even surpassed the 104 TFLOPs of the upcoming GeForce RTX 5090. The Titan V was the first GPU to feature tensor cores, which are crucial for AI processing in the RTX series. However, the Volta-based Titan series ended in 2018 with the Titan X.
Despite this, game driver support for these older GPUs—especially the GTX 10 series—will likely continue for some time. GPUs like the GTX 1060 and GTX 1070 still hold a small but notable presence, making up around 3% of the Steam hardware survey. Additionally, these cards have remained the minimum requirement for many demanding PC games.
