With the launch of CUDA 12.8, Nvidia is stopping any further development on driver features for the widely used GTX 1080 Ti and other GeForce GTX 1000 series cards. Although Nvidia’s latest CUDA drivers still provide official support for the Pascal architecture, which underpins the entire GTX 1000 series, there will be no additional enhancements or new features introduced moving forward.
Legacy Status for Older Architectures
The Maxwell and Volta architectures, which are the direct predecessors to the RTX 2000 series, have also been marked as “legacy.” Nvidia has categorized these architectures as “deprecated” in the release notes for CUDA 12.8. While the GTX 1000 series remains compatible with CUDA 12.8, this move clearly shows that Nvidia is shifting its attention to more recent generations of graphics cards.
CUDA’s Importance in Computing
CUDA serves as Nvidia’s platform and programming model for parallel computing. It empowers developers to harness the capabilities of graphics cards for general computing tasks, including machine learning, scientific calculations, and video editing. Since no new features will come for these older architectures, users of these GeForce GPUs might miss out on future enhancements or optimizations when using CUDA-based applications.
Continued Popularity Among Gamers
Even though they are quite old, graphics cards based on the Pascal architecture are still very much in demand among gamers, as highlighted by Steam’s hardware and software statistics. Several models from the GTX 1000 series are among the top 20, and collectively, these cards represent over 7% of the market. Unfortunately, this leaves owners of these GPUs facing an uncertain future regarding official driver support.
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