Nvidia phases out driver support for Maxwell and Pascal GPUs like GTX 1080 Ti

With the release of CUDA 12.8, Nvidia is halting further development of driver features for the popular GTX 1080 Ti and all other remaining GeForce GTX 1000 series GPUs. While its new CUDA drivers still officially support the Pascal architecture, on which the entire GTX 1000 series of graphics cards is based, no further improvements or new features will be added in the future.

The Maxwell and Volta architectures, which are direct predecessors to the RTX 2000 series, have also been placed in this so-called "legacy" status, as Nvidia labeled these architectures as "deprecated" in the CUDA 12.8 release notes. Although the GTX 1000 series is still compatible with CUDA 12.8, this clearly indicates that Nvidia's focus is shifting towards newer generations of graphics cards.

CUDA is Nvidia's parallel computing platform and programming model. It allows developers to use the power of graphics cards for general computing and specific tasks such as machine learning, scientific computations, and video editing. Since no new features will be developed for these older architectures, users of these GeForce GPUs may miss out on future performance improvements or optimizations for CUDA-based applications.

Despite their advanced age, graphics cards from the Pascal architecture remain highly popular among gamers, which is illustrated by Steam’s hardware and software statistics. Several GTX 1000 series models rank in the top 20 and together these cards account for over 7% of the market. Unfortunately, owners of these GPUs now face an uncertain end concerning the official driver support.