NVIDIA previously warned CUDA users that CUDA 12.x is the last for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs. NVIDIA overnight now officially confirmed that the Maxwell / Pascal / Volta GPU support is going to end in their Linux driver with the upcoming NVIDIA R580 Linux driver series.
Given the prior NVIDIA CUDA deprecation notices and their usual timing for phasing out older generations of GPUs, we’ve known these older NVIDIA GPU generations have been on their death-bed. Now it’s official that NVIDIA R580 series will be the last but at least that means it will be a legacy branch and NVIDIA will continue to provide the occasional fixes such as for newer Linux kernel compatibility.
NVIDIA Maxwell being primarily the GTX 750 and GTX 900 series, Pascal the GTX 1000 series, and Volta the TITAN V / Quadro GV10. Besides the R580 legacy driver, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 “Maxwell1” GPUs at least enjoy pretty decent support on the Nouveau driver stack and don’t require any closed-source and signed microcode for operation so you can also enjoy GPU re-clocking there. It’s with the GeForce GTX 900 series and later where the signed firmware requirement was introduced and where power management / re-clocking became more challenging for the Nouveau driver stack. With the GTX 900 / GTX 1000 series it’s also in a tough spot as only with the GTX 1600 / RTX 2000 series and newer is where there is the NVIDIA GPU System Processor “GSP” that is the focus of the modern Nouveau efforts and the future NOVA driver.
NVIDIA’s deprecation schedule notes of the upcoming 580 Linux driver release:
“The release 580 series will be the last to support GPUs based on the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures.”
The deprecation schedule also notes that the NVIDIA 580 series is the last to support X.Org X11 server versions older than v1.17.
If their usual release timings hold, the NVIDIA 580 Linux driver series will likely be in beta soon and the stable version out later in the year. It will be interesting to see what other new features and optimizations will be found in this next driver series.
