Nvidia is launching the first volley of RTX 50 series GPUs based on its new Blackwell architecture, starting with the RTX 5090 and working down from there. The company also appears to be making 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 through 2016's GTX 1000 series, plus a few Quadro and Titan workstation cards – are currently still supported by NVIDIA's December Game Game Driver Package , the End of New CUDA feature support suggests that these GPUs will eventually be removed from these driver packages soon.
It's common for Nvidia and AMD to drop support for a different set of architectures all together 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 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 ones. games.
