NVIDIA stops driver support for Maxwell, Pascal, Volta – GTX 1080 Ti officially enters legacy list

NVIDIA has just released its first GeForce 590 driver, marking an important milestone: ending Game Ready Driver (GRD) support for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs.

NVIDIA had previously hinted that GPUs based on these three architectures would stop receiving GRD updates after the 580 driver branch. And that officially became true when the 590 branch was released, only supporting GPUs from the GeForce 16 series and above, namely the Turing, Ampere, Ada Lovelace, and Blackwell architectures . On Linux, the company also made a similar move.

This doesn't mean older GPUs will be completely 'abandoned'. NVIDIA says they will be moved to a legacy driver branch , where they will continue to receive necessary security patches and updates. However, users with GPUs from before the GeForce 16/20 era will no longer receive performance optimizations for new games.

The list of GPUs supported in the GeForce 590+ driver branch is long, ranging from Blackwell (RTX 50), Ada Lovelace (RTX 40), Ampere (RTX 30) to Turing (RTX 20 and GTX 16), on both desktop and laptop versions. This also means that the GeForce 16 series will be the last GTX series to continue receiving Game Ready Drivers .

Table 1: GPU Support for NVIDIA Driver Branch 590+ (Desktop)

GPU Support for NVIDIA Driver Branch 590+ (Mobile/Laptop)

Tương lai của driver GRD sẽ tập trung vào bốn thế hệ kiến trúc mới: Turing, Ampere, Ada Lovelace và Blackwell. Những ai vẫn đang trung thành với Pascal hay Maxwell cần cân nhắc nâng cấp nếu muốn tiếp tục được hưởng các tối ưu game hiện đại.

Kareem Winters

Update 08 December 2025