NVIDIA's v580 Driver Branch Ends Support for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs

[LastDudeALive]

Wheres the outrage about Nvidia ending driver support?

When it's Nvidia ending support after 11 years (Maxwell), 9 years (Pascal) or 7 years (Volta) then it's crickets.
But god forbid AMD dares moving Vega and Polaris to maintenance branch and it's the end of the world and AMD is such a bad company for only supporting their cards for up to 8 years. Double standards much?

And yet somehow, AMD is supposedly worse...

It's only 1-2 years more than AMD.

Nvidia: ~10 years. AMD: ~8 years.

The issue with AMD ending support for Vega was they were still actively manufacturing and selling APUs with Vega graphics. You could buy a brand-new APU and already be on EoL support with no support for new games, which is unacceptable. The last Vega APU (Ryzen 7 5825U) was released on 2022. So it was really only a year between the last Vega release and EoL support in 2023, which is unacceptable. The last consumer Pascal chip was released 7 years ago and doesn't have RT or Tensor cores, so finally putting it on EoL is reasonable. They also just released the 5050 explicitly for people still on these cards.

 

[Tomorrow]

The issue with AMD ending support for Vega was they were still actively manufacturing and selling APUs with Vega graphics. You could buy a brand-new APU and already be on EoL support with no support for new games, which is unacceptable. The last Vega APU (Ryzen 7 5825U) was released on 2022. So it was really only a year between the last Vega release and EoL support in 2023, which is unacceptable. The last consumer Pascal chip was released 7 years ago and doesn't have RT or Tensor cores, so finally putting it on EoL is reasonable. They also just released the 5050 explicitly for people still on these cards.

Sigh. This has been discussed to death and already proven that these are not new models being sold with Vega. These are clearance sales of old laptops with very few actual units and no one should be buying them anyways, because for the same price it's possible to get something much newer RDNA based.

As for 5825U - The last laptops with Vega iGPU's were launched in 2022. That was before support ended.
This was on those laptop makers using Vega in 2022 when RDNA was already an option. And buyers not doing their research.
Also if we assume Vega active support had continued then what kind of advances on performance could there been on a slow Vega iGPU anyway?

What does 5050 do with RT cores? it's so weak that i wont be able to meaningfully run anything RT related anyway before choking. 8GB means it's already DOA anyway and will age incredibly poorly regardless of continued driver support. Especially at 250. Below 180 it could have a place.

 

[Daven]

The issue with AMD ending support for Vega was they were still actively manufacturing and selling APUs with Vega graphics. You could buy a brand-new APU and already be on EoL support with no support for new games, which is unacceptable. The last Vega APU (Ryzen 7 5825U) was released on 2022. So it was really only a year between the last Vega release and EoL support in 2023, which is unacceptable. The last consumer Pascal chip was released 7 years ago and doesn't have RT or Tensor cores, so finally putting it on EoL is reasonable. They also just released the 5050 explicitly for people still on these cards.

While I agree with your sentiment, the Vega graphics iGPUs were still supported in the last driver version released for them. It's not like they stopped working the minute a new driver was released that did not include those parts. Also I doubt any new drivers would have done anything to benefit these old, very mature parts.

 

[LastDudeALive]

As for 5825U - The last laptops with Vega iGPU's were launched in 2022. That was before support ended.

A year before support ended. The last Pascal units were released 8 years before support ended. Do you understand the difference?

 

[Daven]

Sigh. This has been discussed to death and already proven that these are not new models being sold with Vega. These are clearance sales of old laptops with very few actual units and no one should be buying them anyways, because for the same price it's possible to get something much newer RDNA based.

As for 5825U - The last laptops with Vega iGPU's were launched in 2022. That was before support ended.
This was on those laptop makers using Vega in 2022 when RDNA was already an option. And buyers not doing their research.
Also if we assume Vega active support had continued then what kind of advances on performance could there been on a slow Vega iGPU anyway?

What does 5050 do with RT cores? it's so weak that i wont be able to meaningfully run anything RT related anyway before choking. 8GB means it's already DOA anyway and will age incredibly poorly regardless of continued driver support. Especially at 250. Below 180 it could have a place.

LastDudeAlive is talking about Barcelo-R Ryzen mobile chips in the 7000 series that included GCN. They were released in January 2023.

List of AMD Ryzen processors - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

A year before support ended. The last Pascal units were sold 8 years before support ended. Do you understand the difference?

Oh maybe LastDudeAlive doesn't know about Barcelo-R. But the point still stands that the last GCN chips made it into 2023.

 

[Onasi]

What does 5050 do with RT cores? it's so weak that i wont be able to meaningfully run anything RT related anyway before choking.

It’s not about RT cores per se, it’s fairly obvious about supporting the full DX12_2 feature set. The cards that are at the end of their support are all lacking that. Of course, argument could be made that the 16xx cards also fall under that, but I assume NV logic is that they still architecturally fall under Turing and it wouldn’t make sense to cut them off.

 

[Tomorrow]

A year before support ended. The last Pascal units were sold 8 years before support ended. Do you understand the difference?

I very much doubt Pascal were sold all that time. After the initial 1-2 years it was probably just clearance sales. Especially when Turing came out.
Also we need to separate laptop and desktop here. On laptops all manufacturers do shady things to mislead and confuse buyers to either buy their old stuff or buy new stuff that have just updated names and little else.

 

[LastDudeALive]

While I agree with your sentiment, the Vega graphics iGPUs were still supported in the last driver version released for them. It's not like they stopped working the minute a new driver was released that did not include those parts. Also I doubt any new drivers would have done anything to benefit these old, very mature parts.

Yeah, of course they didn't stop working. But they lose optimizations for new games, even extremely lightweight games that could run on them. And the main point is that OP was saying people are unfairly attacking AMD for ending driver support, but not Nvidia. But there's a very big difference between the last Pascal consumer card being released 8 years before EoL, and the last Vega consumer product being released 1 year before.

I very much doubt Pascal were sold all that time. After the initial 1-2 years it was probably just clearance sales. Especially when Turing came out.
Also we need to separate laptop and desktop here. On laptops all manufacturers do shady things to mislead and confuse buyers to either buy their old stuff or buy new stuff that have just updated names and little else.

No, there were new laptop chip models with Vega iGPUs released 1 year before Vega became EoL. It's entirely AMD's fault for not updating their iGPUs to use RDNA or RDNA 2, they continued to use Vega far longer than necessary, and then pulled the rug on new game support. That's a massive difference between the 8 year gap for Nvidia and the 1 year gap for AMD.

Oh maybe LastDudeAlive doesn't know about Barcelo-R. But the point still stands that the last GCN chips made it into 2023.

Oh yeah that's even worse if there were new models sold the same year they got EoL'd. That's just awful. I was just going by the TPU database.

 

[theglaze]

8.34% of current Steam users affected, at least.
"Other" at 9.32% includes Titan and other models

 

[hsew]

The issue with AMD ending support for Vega was they were still actively manufacturing and selling APUs with Vega graphics. You could buy a brand-new APU and already be on EoL support with no support for new games, which is unacceptable. The last Vega APU (Ryzen 7 5825U) was released on 2022. So it was really only a year between the last Vega release and EoL support in 2023, which is unacceptable. The last consumer Pascal chip was released 7 years ago and doesn't have RT or Tensor cores, so finally putting it on EoL is reasonable. They also just released the 5050 explicitly for people still on these cards.

Actually, even though they're rebrands (ugh), AMD did equip 7x30U APUs with Vega 8 iGPU, with two examples, the 7530U and 7330U, launching in the beginning of 2023!

Sigh. This has been discussed to death and already proven that these are not new models being sold with Vega. These are clearance sales of old laptops with very few actual units and no one should be buying them anyways, because for the same price it's possible to get something much newer RDNA based.

As for 5825U - The last laptops with Vega iGPU's were launched in 2022. That was before support ended.

Any new model laptop sold in 2023 with a 7530U (which also launched in 2023 as I pointed out above) was in fact a new model at the time and not a clearance model.

This was on those laptop makers using Vega in 2022 when RDNA was already an option. And buyers not doing their research.
Also if we assume Vega active support had continued then what kind of advances on performance could there been on a slow Vega iGPU anyway?

I'm going to give the blame to AMD here for changing their naming system from the sensible GenClassSuffix (ie 4800H, although even then they started to mess with this in the 5000 series by mixing Zen 2 with Zen 3 based on if the class number was even or odd. Ridiculous!) to the completely arbitrary and ridiculous YearClassGenSuffix (ie 7530U) for literally no other reason than to sneakily transition from what was once a clear, straightforward mobile naming system to a system which was literally designed to trick consumers. OEMs loved it since they were able to sell chips with new-sounding names which they got at a large discount compared to actual Zen 4 parts. And at the end of the day, this change is largely unjustified since their desktop series still follows a more sensible naming system, with suffixes and classes doing more to differentiate chips.

What does 5050 do with RT cores? it's so weak that i wont be able to meaningfully run anything RT related anyway before choking. 8GB means it's already DOA anyway and will age incredibly poorly regardless of continued driver support. Especially at 250. Below 180 it could have a place.

Unless Intel gets B580 prices back to $250, the 5050 will have no competition outside of a hypothetical 9050. It's going to rely on MFG, sure, but nothing AMD currently has can even touch it. B580 isn't even better in every case than the 4060, since last we checked, Intel GPUs struggle mightily with older platforms. Having $300 changes the story, sure, but almost nobody except for SFF builders buying a 5050 is doing so if they had the option to spend more for a 5060/9060.

I very much doubt Pascal were sold all that time. After the initial 1-2 years it was probably just clearance sales. Especially when Turing came out.
Also we need to separate laptop and desktop here. On laptops all manufacturers do shady things to mislead and confuse buyers to either buy their old stuff or buy new stuff that have just updated names and little else.

The difference being the chips in those clearance laptops weren't suddenly rebranded as "new" parts using a new deceptive naming scheme and sold as such... They were still GTX 10 series. Has nVidia made some weird plays with their MX series in the past? Yes. And I don't give them a pass for that either. I'll call out bad behavior when I see it

 

[Onasi]

8.34% of current Steam users affected, at least.
"Other" at 9.32% includes Titan and other models

View attachment 406101

It’s hardly an issue, this isn’t Mission Impossible, the cards aren’t going to self-destruct once the drivers are stopped. Sure, at SOME POINT even games will end their support, but I don’t think it would be before 2027-2028, and by that point even Pascal would be over a decade old, which… come on. And a lot of people on Steam play, I dunno, CS and DOTA and those aren’t likely to stop the support even then - Valve is VERY backwards compatibility friendly when all is said and done. Hell, they kept Windows 7 support until 2024, that’s not too shabby.

 

[Dr. Dro]

As for 5825U - The last laptops with Vega iGPU's were launched in 2022. That was before support ended.
This was on those laptop makers using Vega in 2022 when RDNA was already an option. And buyers not doing their research.
Also if we assume Vega active support had continued then what kind of advances on performance could there been on a slow Vega iGPU anyway?

What does 5050 do with RT cores? it's so weak that i wont be able to meaningfully run anything RT related anyway before choking. 8GB means it's already DOA anyway and will age incredibly poorly regardless of continued driver support. Especially at 250. Below 180 it could have a place.

One word: Barcelo. Not to mention the whole Rebrandeon going on on their CPU side

5050 will be fine. You'll be able to play Metro Exodus on it. It's a step up. Only need AMD to release the 9060 and possibly a 9050 XT.

 

[theglaze]

It’s hardly an issue, this isn’t Mission Impossible, the cards aren’t going to self-destruct once the drivers are stopped.

I was curious what percentage of the user market run these cards.
And decided to share those numbers from Steam.

 

[Dr. Dro]

I was curious what percentage of the user market run these cards.
And decided to share those numbers from Steam.

Yeah it won't be the end of the world, at least for now. But it's the beginning of the end. Vega owners know it well: it's a driver maintenance update every 6 months, on the same code base from when support actually stopped. And then it fizzles out. It'll still work, but compatibility slowly starts to take a hit.

 

[Sithaer]

The last drivers that were stable for me on my 4080 were the 566.36 ones. I've not updated to any subsequent ones as each one I've tried has been garbage and introduced issues.

Currently I'm on 576.52 with a 5070 'got the card 2+ weeks ago' and I've had no real issues so far and no black screens either, never had a single driver related issue with my 3060 Ti in the past 2.5 years either.
The only smaller issue I've ran into with the 5070 is that I was getting some weird red hue light on the textures in Unreal Engine games when I've had a global x16 anisotropic filtering enabled in the driver but once I've disabled that it fixed the issue.

 

[igormp]

Did folks even read the news?

This is about the Linux driver. Currently the linux one has 2 possible kernel drivers: the proprietary ones, and the open source ones (nvidia-open).

Nvidia-open is only supported by GPUs that have the GSP, which means Turing and newer. This driver is currently the default one for their ".run" installer. Hopper, Blackwell and never are only supported by this open driver.
The proprietary one is the one that supports pre-GSP GPUs, so Pascal, Volta and Maxwell fit in here. Newer GPUs such as Hopper and Blackwell are not supported by this driver.

From this announcement we can easily infer that the proprietary kernel driver will be dropped in the future, alongside with the support for the non-GSP GPUs, that was already been expected since nvidia-open became a thing.

There's also no specific date for when v580 will drop. From nvidia's usual schedule, I'd expect it to drop by Jan 2026. However, Nvidia usually keeps support for previous version for a long time.
We're currently on version v575, but both v535, v550 and v570 got recent-ish updates as well. So I expect that those "legacy" drivers will still exist for some extra time, likely 1 or 2 extra years.
For reference:

Linux AMD64 Display Driver Archive | NVIDIA

Linux AMD64 Display Driver Archive

www.nvidia.com

 

[LastDudeALive]

It’s not about RT cores per se, it’s fairly obvious about supporting the full DX12_2 feature set. The cards that are at the end of their support are all lacking that. Of course, argument could be made that the 16xx cards also fall under that, but I assume NV logic is that they still architecturally fall under Turing and it wouldn’t make sense to cut them off.

Yeah, as long as they're continuing to optimize drivers for Turing, might as well make it work for the 16 series as well.

And while everybody says Nvidia's trying to push older cards into planned obsolescence, this, along with things like releasing the Transformer model for the 20 series, shows they aren't. They could have absolutely used the release of the 5050 and this to say "sorry, GTX 16 is losing support as well, we're only supporting RT and AI capable GPUs from now on." That would have made a lot of sense, and nobody would have been surprised. Instead, they're continuing to support the 16 cards for a bit longer.

 

[phints]

Makes sense they are dropping support. Guess it’ll also reduce file sizes again. Drivers are like 900MB. They did a drastic cut a couple years ago by switching compression iirc but now it’s bigger than ever. More likely though the team also identified being spread too thin as a reason for the buggy RTX 5000 driver release that’s only now stabilized.

 

[igormp]

Makes sense they are dropping support. Guess it’ll also reduce file sizes again. Drivers are like 900MB. They did a drastic cut a couple years ago by switching compression iirc but now it’s bigger than ever. More likely though the team also identified being spread too thin as a reason for the buggy RTX 5000 driver release that’s only now stabilized.

The driver being talked about is less than 10MB in size.

 

[hat]

Welp, my hardware is officially ancient...

 

[arbiter]

8.34% of current Steam users affected, at least.
"Other" at 9.32% includes Titan and other models

View attachment 406101

Yea but they said 580 will be last branch to support and since 576 branch, could still be nearly a year of support left for them so don't think its losing it in a month.

 

[Prima.Vera]

The GTX 1080 is still a very good video card for 1080p gaming.

 

[Visible Noise]

Wheres the outrage about Nvidia ending driver support?

These cards will continue to get updates in other driver branches.

Maybe figure out that Nvidia maintains multiple driver branches before complaining that people aren’t complaining.

 

[Tomorrow]

No, there were new laptop chip models with Vega iGPUs released 1 year before Vega became EoL. It's entirely AMD's fault for not updating their iGPUs to use RDNA or RDNA 2, they continued to use Vega far longer than necessary, and then pulled the rug on new game support. That's a massive difference between the 8 year gap for Nvidia and the 1 year gap for AMD.

AMD already used RDNA at that time. AMD's fault was letting OEM's even use Vega at that point.
And again you're comparing desktop dGPU's to a single mobile APU. Vega dGPU's were released in 2017. That's 5 years. Not one year.
8 vs 5. Not 8 vs 1.

One word: Barcelo. Not to mention the whole Rebrandeon going on on their CPU side

One APU model. That the big proof that Vega got abandoned?
What about all those people who used their Vega dGPU's since launch?

5050 will be fine. You'll be able to play Metro Exodus on it. It's a step up. Only need AMD to release the 9060 and possibly a 9050 XT.

Oh wow. How awesome on that overprices 8GB 5050 5030.

Did folks even read the news?

This is about the Linux driver.

And you did not read that Nvidia maintains unified codebase? Besides Nvidia already indicated before that they plan on dropping Maxwell support.
Hoping that somehow windows will continue Maxwell driver support past 2026 is truly huffing copium.

And while everybody says Nvidia's trying to push older cards into planned obsolescence, this, along with things like releasing the Transformer model for the 20 series, shows they aren't. They could have absolutely used the release of the 5050 and this to say "sorry, GTX 16 is losing support as well, we're only supporting RT and AI capable GPUs from now on." That would have made a lot of sense, and nobody would have been surprised. Instead, they're continuing to support the 16 cards for a bit longer.

So because they gave 20 series etc transformer model (that performs worse than cnn) i should overlook all other things they did not give 20 series?
And because they were so "benevolent" that they did not cut off 16 series yet i should praise them?

These cards will continue to get updates in other driver branches.

What other driver branches? Gaming cards have one main driver branch in Windows. Right now the latest is R570. Likely Nvidia will move to R580 later this year and R590 at the beginning of 2026.

Unless you consider R560 and older as separate maintained driver branches - which they're not. These are old drivers that no longer receive updates in those branches.

Maybe figure out that Nvidia maintains multiple driver branches before complaining that people aren’t complaining.

Then i can make the same argument about AMD Linux drivers. And yet ignorant people still complain about a single mobile APU as absolute proof of AMD neglecting Vega.

 

[igormp]

And you did not read that Nvidia maintains unified codebase?

Yes, the base is shared, but not totally unified (otherwise we wouldn't have both a proprietary kernel module and nvidia-open), nor does not mean that the same will apply to windows, nor that it'll happen at the same version as the windows counterpart.
The driver versions are also never perfectly in sync between windows and linux. As an example, Linux is on 575 whereas windows is on 576.

Hoping that somehow windows will continue Maxwell driver support past 2026 is truly huffing copium.

Nvidia usually keeps older versions in their legacy branches with security updates, v580 may live way past 2026.
Kepler still had support on the 470 branch up to last year, 3 years after they lost support from newer branches.
That applied to both Windows and Linux, fwiw.

So it depends on what you call "support". No features? Sure. Some fixes, security updates and support in new systems? That may last until 2027~2029.
I don't really give a crap about Windows usage, but people seem to be doing lots of assumptions and fearmongering over something that has not been officially announced. Yes, everyone knows Maxwell/pascal/volta will get the axe really soon as it has been announced more than once, but there's no indication of when this will take place for Windows, and people are just assuming things from a thing meant for linux.