Nvidia will end official driver support for several iconic graphics card generations sometime next year if it maintains its usual driver release schedule. Most GTX GPUs will be affected, including the GTX 700, 900, and 1000 series—meaning if you've been making the absolute most of your iconic 1080 Ti, you might want to consider an upgrade sometime in the next 12 months.
No graphics cards are supported forever, and with the youngest of these GPU generations being a geriatric nine years old, it's no surprise to learn that driver support is soon coming to a close. Officially, it won't happen until the end of Nvidia's 580 series of drivers, which aren't even out yet. But they're expected to debut sometime before the end of 2025, with a few months of continued support after that. Once Nvidia moves on to the 590 series, though, these cards will no longer be supported by the latest game-ready drivers.
This news comes straight from the horse's mouth, with WCCFTech discovering a mention of support ending in recent Nvidia driver notes . Under the subheading, "Support for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta-based GPUs" (referencing the 700, 900, 1,000, and similar-era professional cards, respectively), a note says that the 580 series of drivers will be the last to support these various architectures.
At the time of writing, Nvidia is on driver release number 576.88, so we have a few more until we hit the 580 series. But once we do, the clock is ticking for many of these older GPUs.
Credit: Nvidia
Although these cards are at or approaching a decade of use, they're still popular among gamers. The GTX 1060 is still in the top 12 of all gaming graphics cards on Steam , with around 2% of the entire user base. If you combine all the other GTX 10 series and 900 series GPUs, you have at least another 5% of gamers playing on these older cards. Come the middle of 2026, the performance on these cards for newer games is likely to suffer.
But then they already lack many of the latest features that make modern cards so performative. There's no ray tracing support, but then those older cards wouldn't have the performance for it anyway. What's more impactful is their lack of DLSS support with no onboard tensor cores for AI upscaling. In recent generations, Nvidia has increasingly relied on AI-powered, so-called "fake frames" to pump up the performance of its GPUs. With no DLSS, these older cards fall well behind, and that's only going to worsen without support for game-specific optimizations in the latest drivers.
Although the GTX 16-series will continue to receive support after this move, it will bring an end to the high-end GTX era of gaming. With the 2000 series, Nvidia officially moved on to RTX branding, where it's stayed ever since.
In 2026, we'll need to put to rest one of the most iconic brands in gaming.
