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Nvidia Ends Mainstream Support for Fermi GPUs and 32-Bit Operating Systems

posted by Fnord666 on Monday April 09 2018, @12:06PM   Printer-friendly
from the 32-bit-should-be-enough-for-anyone dept.

takyon writes:

NVIDIA Moves Fermi GPUs to Legacy Status, Ends Mainstream Driver Support for 32-bit Operating Systems

This week, NVIDIA has announced that they are ending mainstream graphics driver support for Fermi-based GeForce GPUs. Effective as of this month (i.e. immediately), all Fermi products are being moved to legacy support status, meaning they will no longer receive Game Ready driver enhancements, performance optimizations, and bugfixes. Instead, they will only receive critical bugfixes through the end of the legacy support phase in January 2019.

While the announcement mentions 'Fermi series GeForce GPUs,' the actual support plan specifies that mainstream driver support is limited to Kepler, Maxwell, and Pascal GPUs. So presumably all Fermi products are affected.

In the same vein, also effective this month is NVIDIA dropping mainstream driver support for 32-bit operating systems, as announced in December 2017. Like Fermi, 32-bit operating systems will still receive critical security updates through January 2019. This update also encompasses GeForce Experience, which will no longer receive software updates for Windows 32-bit operating systems.

Previously:
Nvidia to Stop Writing Drivers for 32-Bit Systems (Eventually)

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 09 2018, @02:54PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 09 2018, @02:54PM (#664462)

    This is always a problem with closed source drivers...buy a amd card next time, they are now using open source drivers that do work and they life is way bigger

    The "open source" driver for all modern AMD cards depends on proprietary software -- most functions do not work at all without it.

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 10 2018, @07:49AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 10 2018, @07:49AM (#664857)

    Are you talking about firmware? Because then it's no different than the microcode in your CPU, or any other hardware for that matter.

    The thing is, the firmware only depends on the hardware, where as the driver works with a specific OS-version. A company no longer making new firmware for a product only means no more bug fixes, things that used to work won't suddenly stop working. Where as when they stop updating drivers for new OS versions, the next OS update can render the hardware unusable.

    That's why lots of people had to buy new hardware when Windows 10 was released - no Windows 10 compatible drivers - or install Linux, because open source drivers means that hardware support won't be discontinued over night.