Finally time to upgrade your GTX 1080 Ti? One of Nvidia’s greatest GPUs is losing driver support in next major patch
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Nine years have passed since Nvidia launched its massively successful GTX 10 series graphics cards. The flagship model (excluding the Titan cards), was the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, which came out the best part of a year after the non-Ti model. These two cards have had some serious staying power, but Nvidia is soon dropping driver support for what people like to call the G.O.A.T (Greatest Of All Time) of GPUs.
For some, a 10 series GPU remains part of their gaming rigs, especially for those who have been less than impressed by the state for GPU prices in the past few years. Regardless, it’s probably time to move on if you’re still using one of these old GTX cards. Plus, the graphics card market has gotten much better over time, especially in Europe.
GTX 10 series won’t be supported for much longer
Nvidia has confirmed in an update to its Unix graphics feature deprecation schedule that the next major driver branch (version 580) “will be the last to support GPUs based on the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures.” This comprises the GTX 700, GTX 900, and GTX 10 series and comes about half a year since the company said it had “frozen” support for these architectures, as they were considering “feature-complete”.
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Although this update relates to the Unix documentation, it should be noted that it will affect Windows users as a result of the unified driver codebase. Essentially what this means is that owners of these older graphics cards will no longer be able to enjoy driver optimizations via Nvidia’s Game Ready Driver Support – it doesn’t mean the GPU will suddenly stop working.
If you’ve got a GTX 16 series (Turing architecture) card or newer, you should be safe for a whole lot longer. Nvidia has yet to disclose when v580 will be launched, so don’t expect this change to come into effect immediately.
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