Believe it or not, but in May 2026, the GTX 10 series turns ten years old – but despite its age, Pascal remains one of Nvidia’s most fondly remembered generations of GPUs. But, nothing lasts forever – and an official announcement from Nvidia is that they are planning EOL (End of Life) support for their GTX 10, GTX 900 and finally GTX 700 series of legacy GPUs.
Now, you don’t need to panic quite yet – the current Nvidia driver version as of the time I’m writing this article is 576.80, and Nvidia state “The release 580 series will be the last to support GPUs based on the Maxwell, Pascal and Volta architectures”. Volta isn’t relevant for the majority of home users, but Maxwell of course is the 700/900 series and Pascal the GTX 10 series of graphics cards.
From the wording here, it also mentions the release will be the ‘last’ to support, so when 580.21 or even 585.80 release, in theory Pascal (and the other cards) should still recieve driver support, but after that updates won’t roll out.
New drivers not being released doesn’t mean that your GTX 1080 suddenly won’t work; but it will mean shift it (along with other Volta/Pascal/Maxwell gpus) into the legacy product category, with no new improvements or big updates for games. So if a new game released might not be optimized, could have bugs / problems with instability. The reality is though, that while GTX 10 (and the other products mentioned here) are fantastic in their own time, an increasing number of games (and likely more a year or two) simply won’t be able to run on those cards anyway.
While support for technology such as Mesh Shaders is slow to become a standard, the shift has started where Mesh Shaders, Ray Tracing support is required for the game to even function. The number of titles right now isn’t huge – but in a few years with the next generation xbox and playstation 6 on the horizon, and people gradually adopting newer GPUs and upgrades, it’s going to become more common. But already over the last few years games such as Spider-man 2, Doom The Dark Ages and Alan Wake 2 have required the use of next-gen technologies such as Ray Tracing, Mesh Shader etc.
Nvidia is doing this because not only will fewer games be able to run on these cards, but also it requires development resources at Nvidia; and they would rather put those into more ‘relevant’ products. While it is understandably frustrating for owners of these cards, do remember that games will still be able to run, and indie / less demanding games will almost certainly be good to go for years to come.
Also, Nvidia certainly isn’t the only one to do this: AMD also end of lined the vega architecture for example, which was even more baffling because their announcement wasn’t that long after releasing a plethora of iGPU products which used vega GPUs.
Either way; if you’re the owner of one of these cards – it’s not all doom and gloom. You won’t need to worry about upgrading for months (and possibly a year or more at the minimum) if you want the latest driver support. So, if you’re someone still rocking a GTX 1080 Ti and waiting for Nvidia’s RTX 60 series or AMD’s next generation Radeon cards for example – you will probably be good to go.
I also decided to check the Steam Hardware survey out for May, 2025 regarding the percent of users this will affect and then asked grok to comb through the data (I’ve not double checked it, so if Grok screwed up a percent don’t blame me).
Roughly speaking, it will affect 7 percent of users in May 2025, where as the data in January would put it just over 7.7 percent. Do note that Steam Hardware Survey isn’t necessarily 100 percent accurate however, with the likes of eSports Cafe’s throwing off data (and of course, account sharing on the same system).
Oh; and one last thing – this won’t affect owners of GTX 16 products (eg, GTX 1660 Ti). Because the actual GPU core inside of the product is Turing; though lacks the Tensor Cores and Ray Tracing cores found inside the RTX 20 series.
You can find more info on the official Nvidia blog here
