A modder going by SupraGSX has released an unofficial Windows XP driver on GitHub that adds support for NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 10-series "Pascal" graphics cards, including the TITAN Xp. Called Forceware 382.69, it is a patched version of NVIDIA's 368.81 driver from July 2016 and only works on 32-bit Windows XP. The timing is a bit funny, since NVIDIA ended regular driver support for Pascal last year and later dropped the cards from its 590 driver branch. However, Forceware's latest release covers the GTX 1060, GTX 1070, GTX 1070 Ti, GTX 1080, GTX 1080 Ti, TITAN X (Pascal) and TITAN Xp, along with some GTX 900-series and Quadro cards.

It also adds DisplayPort 1.4 HBR3 and HDMI 2.0 handling. SupraGSX notes that these are INF additions, and that not every model was individually validated. The October 4 build fixes OpenGL crashes on Pascal, which was verified on a GTX 1080 Ti. Support for GP107 cards such as the GTX 1050 Ti is experimental and untested on real hardware. X user @TheBobPony, who shared a GPU-Z screenshot of a GTX 1080 running on Windows XP, described the driver as "vibe coded." That claim remains unconfirmed currently, as the project's README and release notes make no mention of AI tools. Readers are cautioned to keep unverified drivers off their primary PCs, AI-coded or otherwise. Still, the effort deserves some credit, if only for keeping the Xp on XP meme alive.

When it was first revealed that EVGA would be leaving the GPU industry, there was speculation that the hardware maker was leaving the industry partly due to direct competition from NVIDIA's own Founder's Edition cards—reference designs that were previously under the purview of EVGA at launch. In a new blog post on his personal blog, former EVGA Product Manager, Brendon Ray Hedrick, confirmed in a recent blog post that these concerns were real, and that they were felt inside EVGA when NVIDIA started selling its own Founder's Edition GPUs more prominently around the launch of the Pascal generation.

When NVIDIA introduced the Pascal Founders Edition cards in 2016, I remember people at EVGA worrying about what that meant for us. We were used to selling NVIDIA's reference designs with our name on them. NVIDIA had sold its own cards before, but this was when the tension became clear to me: the company supplying our GPUs was also making a prominent pitch to sell finished cards directly to our customers. At that launch, the GTX 1080 Founders Edition carried a premium over the announced starting price for partner cards. The concern was the relationship itself. We depended on NVIDIA while competing with it for the same buyers.

Gears of War: E-Day is officially slated to launch on October 6, 2026, and ahead of that launch date, Xbox Game Studios has published the recommended and minimum hardware specifications for E-Day, and it's yet another relatively low-power GPU, much like Forza Horizon 6. According to the game's Steam Store page, which was updated on June 15 with the minimum specifications, Gears of War: E-Day will require at least an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 or RTX 5050 or higher to play. The lowest-tier AMD or Intel GPU that will be able to play E-Day is the Intel Arc A580 or AMD Radeon RX 6600 GPU. Aside from the GPU specs, E-Day requires at least 130 GB of SSD storage, 12 GB of RAM, and an AMD Ryzen 5 2600X, Intel Core i7-6850K, or Core i5-10400.

Curiously, the recommended hardware specifications don't call for much more powerful hardware, with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 or 3060 Ti, AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT, or 9060 XT, or an Intel Arc B580 GPU, 16 GB of RAM, and an AMD Ryzen 5 5600 or Intel Core i5-11600K CPU. While it may seem, at first glance, as though The Coalition and Xbox Game Studios are opting for ray tracing-capable GPUs, it's worth noting that NVIDIA's Pascal GPU generation is officially out of active support, making the RTX 2060 part of the oldest GPU series still supported by NVIDIA. The GTX 1660 Ti is technically part of the same generation, but, in our testing, it is anywhere between 18 and 23% slower than the RTX 2060, even without ray tracing enabled. Of course, there are still questions surrounding the minimum and recommended specifications, the most important of which is the target resolution and frame rates, although those details will only likely be teased out after the game launches.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 10-series graphics cards turn 10 today. In May 2016, NVIDIA debuted the GeForce GTX 1080, powered by the "Pascal" graphics architecture on the TSMC 16 nm FinFET foundry node. This would go on to be the final generation of NVIDIA GeForce GPUs to truly comply with Moore's Law. To illustrate, the GeForce GTX 1080, a predecessor to the current RTX 5080, needed a single 150-Watt 8-pin power connector, and could play AAA games of its time at 4K Ultra HD with the game being rendered at native resolution (no upscaling). "Pascal" established phenomenal standards of performance-per-Watt over the GTX 9-series "Maxwell" generation.

NVIDIA has released GeForce Security Update Driver 582.28 WHQL for Maxwell, Pascal and Volta-based GeForce GPUs, covering hardware that no longer receives regular Game Ready driver updates. This release is strictly focused on security and does not add new features or performance improvements. The 582.28 driver patches several high-severity vulnerabilities in NVIDIA display driver stack, affecting both Windows and Linux systems, as well as NVIDIA vGPU software. Depending on the scenario, these flaws could potentially be exploited to achieve code execution, privilege escalation, data tampering, denial of service, or information disclosure. NVIDIA also addressed a medium-severity issue in the HD Audio driver that could lead to a denial-of-service condition.

No gaming or general bug fixes are listed beyond the security updates. That said, NVIDIA does note a couple of known issues, including slight text distortion in Counter-Strike 2 when running below native resolution, and occasional light flickering in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth on certain system configurations. As mentioned, this driver is intended for users still running older GeForce graphic cards, and NVIDIA recommends installing it to avoid potential security risks.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 582.28 WHQL

Linux can be a solid option for anyone looking for an operating system that supports older hardware, but bleeding-edge distributions like Arch Linux often drop support for older hardware sooner than other distributions. This is exactly what happened recently, as the development team behind Arch Linux decided to upgrade the default NVIDIA GPU driver to version 590. This change means that Arch Linux will no longer support NVIDIA GPUs from the Pascal generation and older—this means GeForce GTX 1000 GPUs and older. Somewhat comically, this happened shortly after AMD's Linux kernel drivers extended support to AMD GPUs dating back to 2012.

Arch Linux has also migrated the default NVIDIA GPU drivers to the nvidia-open, nvidia-dkms, nvidia-open-dkms packages. Previously, the GTX 900 series GPUs were the oldest NVIDIA graphics cards supported by the Linux distro, although there are ways to work around the new support limitations. Users with older NVIDIA GPUs can manually uninstall the official nvidia, nvidia-lts, and nvidia-dkms packages and replace them with the nvidia-580xx-dkms drivers from the community-driven AUR (Arch User Repository).

NVIDIA's latest driver branch, 590, now available on Windows and Linux, introduces new features along with some deprecations. The legendary GeForce GTX 900 "Maxwell" and GTX 10 "Pascal" series are now nearing the end of their driver support. NVIDIA previously stated that the 580 driver series would be the last to fully support these older architectures, and reports from community members testing the v590.44.01 beta indicate that several Pascal-era cards are no longer recognized. Notably, users have reported that cards like the GTX 1050 Ti do not function with this Linux driver, even though the published release notes still list legacy support. This confirms that the official notes are wrong, and that future stable driver releases should carry correct notes of deprecation.

Game Ready updates for Maxwell and Pascal were scheduled to end in October and were extended briefly until the 581.80 Windows driver released in late November. The Linux 590 branch, however, seems to implement the promised change sooner, creating a gap between Linux and Windows support timelines. NVIDIA has also scaled back discrete Volta support, but since Volta had limited consumer discrete releases, the impact on most users is minimal.

Update December 4th 14:55 UTC: NVIDIA GeForce Graphics Drivers 591.44 WHQL for Windows also deprecates GTX 900 and GTX 10 series graphics cards, confirming previous Linux-only deprecation.

NVIDIA has confirmed that its upcoming 580 driver series will be the final release to offer official updates for three of its older GPU architectures. In a recent update to its UNIX graphics deprecation schedule, the company noted that once version 580 ships, Maxwell-, Pascal-, and Volta-based products will no longer receive new drivers or patches. Although this announcement originates from NVIDIA's UNIX documentation, the unified driver codebase means Windows users will face the same cutoff. Owners of Maxwell-era GeForce GTX 700 and GTX 900 cards, Pascal's GeForce GTX 10 lineup, and the consumer-focused Volta TITAN V can expect their last set of performance optimizations and security fixes in the 580 branch.

NVIDIA further explains that ending support for these legacy chips allows its engineering teams to focus on newer hardware platforms. For example, Turing-based GeForce GTX 16 series cards will continue to receive updates beyond driver v580, ensuring gamers can benefit from the latest optimizations and stability improvements even on older platforms. First introduced between 2014 and 2017, Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs will have enjoyed eight to eleven years of official maintenance, among the longest support windows in the industry. While existing driver installations will remain operational, NVIDIA recommends that users who depend on these older cards begin planning upgrades to maintain full compatibility and access new features. At the time of this announcement, the public driver sits at version 576.80, and NVIDIA has not yet set a firm release date for the 580 series, leaving affected users a window of several months before support officially ends.

Team Green's CUDA 12.8 release notes have revealed upcoming changes for three older GPU architectures—the document's "Deprecated and Dropped Features" section outlines forthcoming changes. A brief sentence outlines a less active future for affected families: "architecture support for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta is considered feature-complete and will be frozen in an upcoming release." Further down, NVIDIA states that a small selection of operating systems have been dropped from support lists, including Microsoft Windows 10 21H2 and Debian 11.

Refocusing on matters of hardware—Michael Larabel, Phoronix's editor-in-chief, has kindly provided a bit of history and context. "Four years ago with the NVIDIA 470 series was the legacy branch for GeForce GTX 600 and 700 Kepler series and now as we embark on the NVIDIA 570 driver series, it looks like it could end up being the legacy branch for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta generations of GPUs." Larabel and other industry watchdogs reckon that the incoming "Blackwell" generation is taking priority, with Team Green likely freeing up resources and concentrating less on taking care of decade+ old hardware. VideoCardz believes that gaming GPU support will continue—at least for Maxwell (e.g. GeForce GTX 900) and Pascal (GeForce GTX 10 series)—based on a playtesting of the toolkit's latest set of integrated drivers (version 571.96).

February saw community mods bring resizable BAR support to several older platforms; and now we come across a mod that brings it to some older GPUs. The NVStrapsReBAR mod by terminatorul, which is forked out of the ReBarUEFI mod by xCurio, brings resizable BAR support to NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20-series and GTX 16-series GPUs based on the "Turing" graphics architecture. This mod is intended for power users, and can potentially brick your motherboard. NVIDIA officially implemented resizable BAR support since its RTX 30-series "Ampere" GPUs in response to AMD's Radeon RX 6000 RDNA 2 GPUs implementing the tech under the marketing name Smart Access Memory. While AMD would go on to retroactively enable the tech for even the older RX 5000 series RDNA GPUs, NVIDIA didn't do so for "Turing."

NVStrapsReBAR is a motherboard UEFI firmware mod. It modifies the way your system firmware negotiates BAR size with the GPU on boot. There are only two ways to go about modding a platform to enable resizable BAR on an unsupported platform—by modding the motherboard firmware, or the video BIOS. Signature checks by security processors in NVIDIA GPUs make the video BIOS modding route impossible for most users; thankfully motherboard firmware modding isn't as difficult. There is an extensive documentation by the author to go about using this mod. The author has tested the mod to work with "Turing" GPUs, however, it doesn't work with older NVIDIA GPUs, including "Pascal." Resizable BAR enables the CPU (software) to see video memory as a single contiguously addressable block, rather than through 256 MB apertures.

According to the NVIDIA roadmap that was spotted in the recently published MLCommons training results, the Ada Lovelace successor is set to come in 2025. The roadmap also reveals the schedule for Hopper Next and Grace Next GPUs, as well as the BlueField-4 DPU.

While the roadmap does not provide a lot of details, it does give us a general idea of when to expect NVIDIA's next GeForce architecture. Since NVIDIA usually launches a new GeForce architecture every two years or so, the latest schedule might sound like a small delay, at least if it plans to launch the Ada Lovelace Next in early 2025 and not later. NVIDIA Pascal was launched in May 2016, Turing in September 2018, Ampere in May 2020, and Ada Lovelace in October 2022.

NVIDIA is stepping up to manufacturers of counterfeit graphics card in China according to an article published by MyDrivers - the hardware giant is partnering up with a number of the nation's major e-commerce companies in order to eliminate inventories of bogus GPUs. It is claimed that these online retail platforms, including JD.com and Douyin, are partway into removing a swathe of dodgy stock from their listings. NVIDIA is seeking to disassociate itself from the pool of unlicensed hardware and the brands responsible for flooding the domestic and foreign markets with so-called fake graphics cards. The company is reputed to be puzzled about the murky origins of this bootlegging of their patented designs.

The market became saturated with fake hardware during the Ethereum mining boom - little known cottage companies such as 51RSIC, Corn, Bingying and JieShuoMllse were pushing rebadged cheap OEM cards to domestic e-tail sites. The knock-off GPUs also crept outside of that sector, and import listings started to appear on international platforms including Ebay, AliExpress, Amazon and Newegg. NVIDIA is also fighting to stop the sale of refurbished cards - these are very likely to have been utilized in intensive cryptocurrency mining activities. A flood of these hit the market following an extreme downturn in crypto mining efforts, and many enthusiast communities have warned against acquiring pre-owned cards due to the high risk of component failure.

NVIDIA has quietly removed some video encoding limitations on its consumer GeForce graphics processing units (GPUs), allowing encoding of up to five simultaneous streams. Previously, NVIDIA's consumer GeForce GPUs were limited to three simultaneous NVENC encodes. The same limitation did not apply to professional GPUs.

According to NVIDIA's own Video Encode and Decode GPU Support Matrix document, the number of concurrent NVENC encodes on consumer GPUs have been increased from three to five. This includes certain GeForce GPUs based on Maxwell 2nd Gen, Pascal, Turing, Ampere, and Ada Lovelace GPU architectures. While the number of concurrent NVDEC decodes were never limited, there is a limitation on how many streams you can encode by certain GPU, depending on the resolution of the stream and the codec.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB "Pascal" continues to be a popular choice among TechPowerUp readers as an entry-mainstream graphics card choice over rivals that are two generations ahead. The recent TechPowerUp Frontpage Poll asked our readers what graphics card they'd choose, assuming they're priced the same, with choices that include the GTX 1060 6 GB, GTX 1630 4 GB, GTX 1650 4 GB, RX 570 4 GB, RX 5500 XT 4 GB, RX 6400 4 GB, and the A380 6 GB. The poll received great response, with over 18,200 votes cast since it went live on June 30, 2022, closing on August 16.

The GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB dominated the poll, and nearly scored a simple majority, with 49 percent of the respondents, or 8,920 people, saying they'd choose the card over the others. A distant second was the RX 5500 XT 4 GB, with 15.1 percent, or 2,749 votes. The GTX 1650 and Arc A380 are nearly on par, with 11,9 percent, or around 2,170 votes. The remaining options, including the RX 6400, RX 570, and GTX 1630, are marginal, single-digit percentage choices.

Using our graphics card database, which is managed by our very own T4CFantasy, reddit user u/Vito_ponfe_Andariel created some basic charts mapping out the data points from our expansive, industry-leading GPU database. In these charts, the user compares technological innovation for both AMD and NVIDIA's GPUs in the last ten years, plotting out the performance evolution of the "best available GPU" per year in terms of performance, performance per dollar (using the database's launch price metric), energy consumption, performance per transistor, and a whole lot of other data correlation sets.

It's interesting to note technological changes in these charts and how they relate to the overall values. For example, if you look at the performance per transistor graph, you'll notice that performance per transistor has actually declined roughly 20% with the transition from NVIDIA's Pascal (GTX 1080 Ti) to the Turing (RTX 20-series) architecture. At the same time, AMD's performance per transistor exploded around 40% from Vega 64 to the RX 5700 XT graphics card. This happens, in part, due to the introduction of raytracing-specific hardware on NVIDIA's Turing, which takes up transistor counts without aiding in general shading performance - while AMD benefited from a new architecture in RDNA as well as the process transition from 14 nm to 7 nm. We see this declining performance behavior again with AMD's introduction of the RX 6800 XT from AMD, which loses some 40% in this performance per transistor metric - likely due to the introduction of RT cores and other architectural changes. There are of course other variables to the equation, but it is nonetheless interesting to note. Look after the break for the rest of the charts.

- AAEON, an industry leader in embedded AI edge computing systems, announces a lineup of platforms currently under development powered by the newly released NVIDIA Jetson TX2 NX system on module (SOM). This range of systems, named the BOXER-823x Series, will augment AAEON's lineup of diverse solutions powered by the NVIDIA Jetson edge AI platform. With these platforms planned for release in mid-2021, early adopters have a chance to demo the systems while in development.

The NVIDIA Jetson TX2 NX is the latest addition to NVIDIA's Jetson lineup, slotting in between the NVIDIA Jetson Nano and NVIDIA Xavier NX. Jetson TX2 NX is powered by a NVIDIA Pascal GPU, quad-core Arm Cortex -A57 MPCore processor complex, offering 256 CUDA Cores, 4 GB of onboard LPDD4 memory, and 51.2 GB/s of memory bandwidth compatible with extensions of various standard bus interfaces. In total, this offers AI processing speeds up to 1.33 TFLOPS.

In a move that speaks loads towards the current state of the semiconductor market, NVIDIA has apparently begun reseeding retailers with 5-year-old Pascal-based GTX 1050 Ti graphics cards. In some retailers (namely, Newegg), the card can still be found at $499, a vestige of tight supply since its discontinuation, and a result of the constrained GPU market. However, retailers that have received fresh supply of the 14 nm, 4 GB GDDR5-totting graphics card have it at $179 - still above the 5-year-old asking price at release, which was set at $140. The GTX 1050 Ti features a 192-bit memory bus and a whopping 768 shading units.

Resupplying this card means that customers looking at the lower-end of the spectrum now have a feasible alternative to non-existent solutions on the RTX 3000 series. Equivalent models in the 2000-series are also hard to come by, and marred by much higher pricing. The choice for the GTX 1050 Ti with its 4 GB GDDR5 bus isn't an innocent one; it actually skirts two problems with current-generation hardware. First of all, constraints with GDDR6 memory allocation, which is becoming a bottleneck as well for new graphics card manufacture on account on the increasing amount of chips employed in each individual card, as well as its deployment in latest-gen consoles. And secondly, the 4 GB VRAM is no longer enough for these graphics cards to fit in the current Ethereum mining workload fully into memory, which means they also skirt mining demand. It is, however, a heavy moment for the industry and for any enthusiast who wants to see the progress we have been so readily promised.

NVIDIA has quietly introduced a new entry-level desktop discrete GPU positioned a notch below even the GeForce GT 1030. The new GT 1010 is based on the "Pascal" graphics architecture circa 2016, and is cut further down from the 16 nm "GP108" silicon. The GT 1010 appears to be NVIDIA's move at replacing the "Kepler" based GT 710 from its bare entry-level, and helping the company clear out all remaining inventory of the "GP108" silicon from the channel, out to OEMs. The GT 1010 likely features 256 CUDA cores, 16 TMUs, 16 ROPs, and 2 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 64-bit wide memory bus (40 GB/s bandwidth), with a maximum GPU Boost frequency of 1468 MHz. If the GT 1010 does make it to the retail channel, we expect a sub-$60 price. With these specs, the chip will be easily bested by the latest iGPUs from AMD and Intel.

NVIDIA released a mysterious new mobile GPU that has us scratching our heads over the silicon that could be driving it. The new GeForce MX450 is an entry-mainstream mobile GPU that apparently ships with a PCI-Express gen 4.0 bus interface, something only NVIDIA's "Ampere" GPUs feature. The product page for the MX450 doesn't list out any other specs, than its memory type support including new GDDR6 memory (supported only on NVIDIA architectures "Turing" or later). Interestingly, it also lists GDDR5 as one of its memory options. PCI-Express 4.0 is prominently listed as one of its specs.

Upon digging some more among device IDs, we've come across the ID of the GDDR5 variant, with the ASIC code "GP107-670-A1," and the silicon is based on the much older "Pascal" architecture, which lacks PCIe gen 4 support. The GDDR6 variant eludes us. This is the SKU which could be based on a newer architecture, given its support for GDDR6 and PCIe gen 4. NVIDIA's GeForce MX line of entry-mainstream mobile GPUs are built to performance/power targets, and wildly vary with the underlying tech. They've been historically a means for NVIDIA to clear inventory of older generation ASICs to notebook manufacturers, who get put the NVIDIA logo on their products, and advertise discrete graphics. Given this, the use of a newer (even unreleased) generation of GPUs comes as a surprise.

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 20-series "Turing" graphics card series did not increase video memory sizes in comparison to GeForce GTX 10-series "Pascal," although the memory itself is faster on account of GDDR6. This could change with the GeForce RTX 30-series "Ampere," as the company looks to increase memory sizes across the board in a bid to shore up ray-tracing performance. WCCFTech has learned that in addition to a variety of strange new memory bus widths, such as 320-bit, NVIDIA could introduce certain higher variants of its RTX 30-series cards with video memory sizes as high as 20 GB and 24 GB.

Memory sizes of 20 GB or 24 GB aren't new for NVIDIA's professional-segment Quadro products, but it's certainly new for GeForce, with only the company's TITAN-series products breaking the 20 GB-mark at prices due north of $2,000. Much of NVIDIA's high-end appears to be resting on segmentation of the PG132 common board design, coupled with the GA102 silicon, from which the company could carve out several SKUs spaced far apart in the company's product stack. NVIDIA's next-generation GeForce "Ampere" family is expected to debut in September 2020, with product launches in the higher-end running through late-Q3 and Q4 of 2020.

IBASE Technology Inc. (TPEx: 8050), a world-leading manufacturer of industrial motherboard boards and embedded computing solutions, has revealed its latest EC-3200 AI computing platform that is based on the cutting-edge power-efficient and high-performance NVIDIA Jetson Tegra X2 (TX2) processor. The NVIDIA Jetson TX2 pairs a dual-core Denver 2 alongside a quad-core ARM Cortex -A57 processor and provides 256 CUDA cores on the NVIDIA's advanced Pascal GPU architecture with up to 1.33 TFLOPS, delivering exceptional AI performance.

Designed to operate under an extended temperature range from -20°C to +60°C, the EC-3200 leverages the integrated GPU-computing power of the Jetson TX2 platform in building edge inference servers to analyze and better manage real time traffic flow in smart cities or to optimize the efficiency of operational processes in intelligent factories. "Current edge and cloud-based AI products require better computational and video analytics capability to perform demanding real-time data processing and overcome latency issues," said Wilson Lin, Director of IBASE Product Planning Department. "The EC-3200 is no doubt a durable solution, especially built with a fanless design for non-stop operation and takes advantage of the GPU-accelerated parallel processing of NVIDIA Jetson TX2 to handle data intensive and mission-critical workloads with power efficiency and unmatched reliability."

Microsoft Thursday released the DirectX 12 Ultimate logo. This is not a new API with any new features, but rather a differentiator for graphics cards and game consoles that support four key modern features of DirectX 12. This helps consumers recognize the newer and upcoming GPUs, and tell them apart from some older DirectX 12 capable GPUs that were released in the mid-2010s. For a GPU to be eligible for the DirectX 12 Ultimate logo, it must feature hardware acceleration for ray-tracing with the DXR API; must support Mesh Shaders, Variable Rate Shading (VRS), and Sampler Feedback (all of the four). The upcoming Xbox Series X console features this logo by default. Microsoft made it absolutely clear that the DirectX 12 Ultimate logo isn't meant as a compatibility barrier, and that these games will work on older hardware, too.

As it stands, the "Navi"-based Radeon RX 5000 series are "obsolete", just like some Turing cards from the GeForce GTX 16-series. At this time, the only shipping product which features the logo is NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 20-series and the TITAN RTX, as they support all the above features.

NVIDIA's GeForce MX-series mobile GPU line exists so notebook manufacturers can put the NVIDIA logo on their products and boast of gaming capabilities. The company is giving finishing touches to its new GeForce MX330 and MX350 chips, based on the "Pascal" architecture. The MX330 is the company's second rebrand of the MX150 that's based on the 14 nm "GP108" silicon. It's equipped with 384 CUDA cores, and up to 2 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 64-bit wide memory interface. NVIDIA increased the clock speeds to 1531 MHz base, and 1594 MHz GPU Boost (compared to 1227/1468 MHz of the MX150), while remaining in the 25 W TDP envelope.

The MX350, on the other hand, is based on the 14 nm "GP107" silicon, is equipped with 640 CUDA cores, and 2 GB of GDDR5 memory across the same 64-bit bus width as the MX330; but has aggressive power-management that lends it a TDP of just 20 W, despite 66% more CUDA cores than the MX330. Both chips are easily capable of handling non-gaming tasks on typical 1080p / 1440p notebooks; but can game only at 720p thru 1080p, with low-to-mid settings.

NVIDIA will apparently still be using Pascal when they launch their next generation of low-power discrete graphics solutions for mobile systems. The MX300 series will replace the current crop of MX200 series (segregated in three products in the form of the MX230, MX250 10 W and MX250 25 W). The new MX300 keeps the dual-tiered system, but ups the ante on the top of the line MX350. Even though it's still Pascal, on a 14 nm process, the MX350 should see an increase in CUDA cores to 640 (by using NVIDIA's Pascal GP107 chip) from the MX250's 384. Performance, then, should be comparable to the NVIDIA GTX 1050.

The MX330, on the other hand, will keep specifications of the MX250, which signals a tier increase from the 256 execution units in the MX230 to 384. This should translate to appreciable performance increases for the new MX300 series, despite staying on NVIDIA's Pascal architecture. The new lineup is expected to be announced on February.

NVIDIA released their latest driver package version, updating the software number up to 431.18. The new hotfix driver builds upon the previous 430.86 release, already fixed upon by another, previous hotfix driver 430.97.

This new release fixes BSODs on hibernation wake-up for ASUS' ASUS GL703GS/Asus GL502VML notebooks; game crashes or TDR on Shadow of the Tomb Raider when launching the game on Pascal GPUs; Shadow of the Tomb Raider's benchmark exiting abruptly should ray tracing be enabled; and flickering issues on Grand Theft Auto V when MSAA is enabled. Look below for the updated driver.NVIDIA GeForce 431.18 Hotfix Driver