Now that NVIDIA is rolling out the “Blackwell” GPU driver support, it looks like the NVIDIA Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta generations will soon be moving to a legacy driver branch.
Four years ago with the NVIDIA 470 series was the legacy branch for GeForce GTX 600 / 700 Kepler series and now as we embark on the NVIDIA 570 driver series, it looks like it could end up being the legacy branch for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta generations of GPUs. NVIDIA Maxwell was introduced 11 years ago with the GeForce GTX 750 series and followed by the GTX 900 series. Pascal came out in 2016 with the GeForce GTX 1000 series. Volta came out in 2017 for the Tesla V100 / DGX-1 and Titan V and other datacenter/workstation hardware.
A Phoronix reader pointed out that the legacy branch for the Maxwell / Pascal / Volta GPUs is likely imminent and the CUDA release notes also reiterate that the Maxwell / Pascal / Volta GPU support is to be “frozen in an upcoming release.” This pans out with Blackwell rolling out and Maxwell being a decade old.
This will leave those still using Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs to use whatever ends up being the new legacy branch and/or switching to the open-source Nouveau driver stack to mixed results.
Dropping the Maxwell / Pascal / Volta support will also be beneficial to the NVIDIA driver development since it’s for the RTX 20 “Turing” and newer GPUs where there is the GPU System Processor (GSP). Thus moving development forward they would just need to focus on the GSP-present world of supported hardware. It’s also the GSP-present hardware where NVIDIA is focused on their open-source kernel modules and where Red Hat is focusing on their Rust-based NOVA kernel driver.
Separately, yesterday’s NVIDIA CUDA update also rolled out the first public R570 Linux driver build… I can confirm that the new NVIDIA driver there does work with the GeForce RTX 5090 on Linux. I’ll have the first GeForce RTX 5090 Linux benchmarks out in a few hours with busy testing since yesterday using that new driver version.
