Death and taxes, folks. Even the best technology can’t last forever, and plenty of people consider Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 10 series—specifically the 1080 Ti—to be the best it’s ever made. But the company just confirmed that the October Game Ready driver release for the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta series of GPUs will be the last one.
The Maxwell architecture technically goes all the way back to several later members of the GTX 700 series, starting with the low-end 745, 750, and 750 Ti released in early 2014. The latest consumer cards affected by this change will be the bombastic TITAN series, on the other end of the price and power spectrum, with the Titan V CEO Edition released in 2018. All GTX 900 and 10 series cards are included in these families.
After the 580 drivers are finished off in October, which is perhaps not coincidentally the same time that Windows 10 was slated to be killed, these cards will be switched to a quarterly security update schedule. But they won’t be getting the more deliberate performance and compatibility updates, which Nvidia gamers rely upon to make sure the latest games run smoothly on their gaming desktops and laptops. The change was heralded by a drop in support for Unix on the same chips.
While they’re getting harder to find, some of the 10-series cards are still popular, especially on the mid-range and budget side of things. The June 2025 Steam Hardware Survey still lists the GTX 1060 as the 12th-most popular card on the market, and the 1050 Ti isn’t too far behind. But more expensive cards are far lower, which makes sense as those with more means have probably upgraded. The GTX 1070 is used by only 0.85 percent of Steam participants.
It’s important to note that the 10 series doesn’t include some newer mid-range and budget GTX cards, including the 1630, 1650, 1650 Super, 1660, and 1660 Ti. Those are Turing-based cards, a different architecture that began in 2019 and are still supported with new drivers.
