Over on The Full Nerd podcast, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 is known as The GOAT, the graphics card that still hasn’t been beaten for value, gains over its predecessors, and performance in its time. But its time might just be up. Nvidia is ending support for Unix graphics for the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta series of GPUs…which means that the last batch of major GTX cards might be on their way out.
If you’re a bit confused, it’s understandable. Unix support shouldn’t have anything to do with gamers that are overwhelmingly using Windows, right? Unfortunately, Nvidia tends to drop all support for graphics card architecture once it stops the Unix development, according to VideoCardz. That means that the 580 release of the graphics card driver package will probably be the last one for GTX 700, 900, and 10-series cards, no matter what operating system you’re using.
The slightly newer GTX 16 series (1630, 1650, 1650 Super, 1660, 1660 Ti, 1660 Super) which started hitting shelves in 2019 might hang on a little longer, as they’re more affordable cards based on the same Turing architecture as the initial RTX 20 series. And it’s not as if missing out on game-ready drivers will suddenly make the older cards (released from 2014-2017) suddenly stop working — they just won’t get optimizations for new games.
But it would certainly be the end of an era, and a frustrating push to upgrade for those users still holding on to these cards as GPU prices have skyrocketed.