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

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)


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  • (Score: 2) by mobydisk on Monday April 09 2018, @03:01PM (3 children)

    by mobydisk (5472) on Monday April 09 2018, @03:01PM (#664470)

    The article is about video drivers. The drivers *ARE* the abstractions. They are often hand-coded assembly or C code. I'm curious who still has a 32-bit x86 CPU these days. I find most 32-bit Windows machines are people running 32-OSs on 64-bit machines and don't even know it. Or corporate deployments where they haven't updated their images for a long time. (And they are probably using intel GPUs)

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 09 2018, @03:17PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 09 2018, @03:17PM (#664483)

    A 32-bit computer is perfectly adequate for the vast majority of computing tasks.

    In the "old" days, when you wanted to perform some kind of special-purpose computation, like rending a polygon for a video game, you'd extend your 32-bit machine with a special-purpose computing device called a "GPU". Very many millions of these extensible, 32-bit machines were manufactured and exist in this world today.

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by bob_super on Monday April 09 2018, @05:27PM (1 child)

      by bob_super (1357) on Monday April 09 2018, @05:27PM (#664556)

      These devices do not require driver updates to optimize performance in applications that use more memory than they can support.
      These devices haven't been sold for quite a while, so, as GP points out, very few are still used for anything but menial tasks, requiring no new drivers.

      Exceptions do exist, but catering for revenue-free exceptions is a good way to run run a general-purpose company into the ground.
      Driver designers and testers don't work for peanuts.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 09 2018, @06:33PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 09 2018, @06:33PM (#664592)

        That's it. That's all you need to do.

        This bitching is nonsensical.