Don’t rush to purchase a new GPU: It’s been two years since Nvidia stopped CUDA support for 7-series cards while they still received driver updates.
According to the latest update to Nvidia’s CUDA Toolkit, support for the Maxwell and Pascal architectures—specifically the GTX 9 and 10-series cards—will be phased out in an upcoming update. Users of these graphics cards can expect to continue receiving GeForce driver updates; however, Nvidia has not specified how long this will last.
The patch notes detail that support for these architectures will become ‘feature-complete’ after the next CUDA Toolkit release.
Despite this, the GTX 970 and 980 Ti remain significant for gamers, owing to their historical value in terms of performance against cost. For example, the GTX 1060 was still the most popular GPU according to Steam’s Hardware Survey in March 2022, six years post-release.
While Nvidia hasn’t publicly disclosed when the driver updates for these older architectures will cease, historical data from similar transitions suggests they might continue until late 2026 based on previous generation timelines.
In summary, even with advanced options like the RTX 5090 entering the market, there’s still plenty of capability left in older hardware.
