We called it a few weeks ago. And now it’s official. Nvidia will unleash one final major driver release for its Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta graphics architectures. And that’ll be it. In somewhat better news, Nvidia has also announced plans to keep releasing Windows 10 Game Ready Drivers for all RTX GPUs until October 2026, a year after Microsoft itself will have given up on the OS.
“NVIDIA will announce that after a final Game Ready Driver (GRD) release in October 2025, GeForce GPUs based on Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures will transition to receiving quarterly security updates for the next three years (through October 2028),” Nvidia told us in a statement.
Nvidia also emphasised that this represents a generous overall support window for these graphics cards, saying, “our support lifetime for these GPUs reaches up to 11 years, well beyond industry norms.” Strictly speaking, the newest Pascal GPUs are only nine years old. But Nvidia has a point. A decade, give or take, is a pretty decent run for a gaming GPU.
Regarding Windows 10 support, Nvidia said, “alongside this update, we’re extending Windows 10 GRD support for all RTX GPUs to October 2026, a year beyond the operating system’s end-of-life, to ensure users continue to receive the latest Day 0 optimizations for new games and apps.”
Windows 10, of course, is officially dead come October 14, though Microsoft has announced its own partial stay of execution when it comes to critical security updates.
To recap, Maxwell comprises the GeForce GTX 7 and 9-series, while Pascal is the architecture on which GTX 10 Series graphics cards were based. For the record, the GTX 1650 and GTX 1660 are actually based on the newer Turing architecture, which isn’t included in this deprecation.
As for Volta, it’s basically an enterprise server-only architecture, so not gaming relevant. There are no Volta-based gaming GPUs.
As we correctly predicted, even after full support ends you’ll still be getting driver releases for major security flaw fixes. But owners of Maxwell and Pascal GPUs won’t be included in “Game Ready” optimisations beyond that final driver fork in October.
It’s worth noting that AMD’s Adrenalin drivers only cover RDNA-based chips from the past six years, so Nvidia certainly cannot be accused of a cut and run on its customers, at least not compared to the competition. All good things must come to an end. And it’s nigh for Maxwell and Pascal gaming. At least with up-to-date drivers.
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