Nvidia is launching the primary volley of RTX 50-series GPUs based mostly on its new Blackwell structure, beginning with the RTX 5090 and dealing downward from there. The corporate additionally seems to be winding down help for a number of of its older GPU architectures, in keeping with these CUDA launch notes noticed by Tom’s {Hardware}.
The discharge notes say that CUDA help for the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPU architectures “is taken into account feature-complete and will likely be frozen in an upcoming launch.” Whereas all of those architectures—which collectively cowl GeForce GPUs from the previous GTX 700 sequence all the best way up by 2016’s GTX 1000 sequence, plus a few Quadro and Titan workstation playing cards—are nonetheless presently supported by Nvidia’s December Sport Prepared driver package deal, the top of recent CUDA function help means that these GPUs will finally be dropped from these driver packages quickly.
It’s normal for Nvidia and AMD to drop help for one more batch of architectures all of sudden each few years; Nvidia final dropped help for older playing cards in 2021, and AMD dropped help for a number of distinguished GPUs in 2023. Each corporations preserve a separate driver department for a few of their older playing cards, however releases often solely occur each few months, they usually deal with safety updates, not on offering new options or efficiency optimizations for brand spanking new video games.
