Nvidia’s Maxwell and Pascal families of GPUs set new bars for performance and power efficiency when they first launched, but the world of real-time graphics has gone through massive shifts since their launches about 10 years ago. Even with those industry shifts, GeForce 10-series cards have soldiered on with solid enough performance in many games, especially the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and its 11GB of VRAM.
Despite Pascal’s impressive longevity, Nvidia is ready to move on. The company confirmed this morning that it’s ending new Game Ready driver development and support for these products. In a press release, the company says that “after a final Game Ready Driver 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).”
This announcement confirms plenty of smoke signals warning of this change, and it will affect a substantial number of gamers. GTX 9-series graphics cards are rare sights on the Steam Hardware Survey these days (possibly due to their limited VRAM pools), but GTX 10-series products still make up a notable slice of the PC gaming pie. The only Volta desktop card was the Titan V, and we expect that only a tiny handful of those are still in use.