In an effort to streamline its driver package, NVIDIA will cease to support many older GPUs in its Windows driver releases. After the upcoming NVIDIA driver release 340, and starting with release 343, any GPU older than the GTX 400 series will no longer be supported.
Owners of older cards won’t be completely cut off, however. While these cards won’t receive any new features or performance enhancements, NVIDIA promises to release any critical bug fixes until April 1, 2016.
NVIDIA has traditionally offered support for older products, but as graphics technology continues to evolve, keeping these older cards in the mix can sometimes make advancements more difficult, in addition to occupying the resources of NVIDIA’s software engineers who are working on the future of 4K, multi-display, and G-SYNC technologies. NVIDIA also undoubtedly hopes that the loss of continued support will give some gamers the impetus to upgrade to a newer GPU.
Those with older cards can continue to use them, of course, but they’ll be stuck on NVIDIA driver release 340 and will miss out on any new features or performance improvements. The full list of cards that will lose support under the new policy can be found at NVIDIA’s support site.
The current certified NVIDIA driver is version 335.23, released March 10th.
