Nvidia is launching the first volley of RTX 50-series GPUs based on its new Blackwell architecture, starting with the RTX 5090 and working downward from there. The company also appears to be winding down support for a few of its older GPU architectures, according to these CUDA release notes spotted by Tom’s Hardware.
The release notes say that CUDA support for the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPU architectures “is considered feature-complete and will be frozen in an upcoming release.” While all of these architectures—which collectively cover GeForce GPUs from the old GTX 700 series all the way up through 2016’s GTX 1000 series, plus a couple of Quadro and Titan workstation cards—are still currently supported by Nvidia’s December Game Ready driver package, the end of new CUDA feature support suggests that these GPUs will eventually be dropped from these driver packages soon.
It’s common for Nvidia and AMD to drop support for another batch of architectures all at once every few years; Nvidia last dropped support for older cards in 2021, and AMD dropped support for several prominent GPUs in 2023. Both companies maintain a separate driver branch for some of their older cards but releases usually only happen every few months, and they focus on security updates, not on providing new features or performance optimizations for new games.