Nvidia moves Fermi to legacy driver support

Nvidia moves Firmi to legacy driver support

Nvidia moves Fermi to legacy driver support

At the start of this year, Nvidia dropped support for 32-bit operating systems, transitioning their latest Geforce drivers exclusively to 64-bit system architectures.

Alongside this change, Nvidia has now confirmed that they are dropping “Game Ready” driver support for Fermi, the GPU architecture which was used primarily for the company’s GTX 400 and 500 series of graphics cards. This change means that Nvidia has no plans to release any performance enhancing drivers, feature upgrades or bug fixes for this GPU architecture in the future, aside from critical security updates. 

Just like 32-bit, Nvidia only plans to release critical security updates for Fermi until January 2019. Fermi was Nvidia’s first DirectX 11 compliant GPU architecture, making this the first DirectX 11 compliant GPU series from Nvidia to be retired. 

Moving forward, Nvidia only plans to release new driver updates for Kepler, Maxwell and Pascal series GPUs, at least until Nvidia releases their next generation of graphics hardware.

 


     Effective April 2018, Game Ready Driver upgrades, including performance enhancements, new features, and bug fixes, will be available only on Kepler, Maxwell, and Pascal series GPUs.  Critical security updates will be available on Fermi series GPUs through January 2019. 

  

Nvidia moves Firmi to legacy driver support

 

The loss of legacy support will allow Nvidia to dedicated more resources to address issues with their more modern hardware and optimise their driver stack further without any fear of degrading the performance of legacy hardware. Nvidia’s GTX 400 series of Fermi GPUs released in 2010, making the architecture eight years old, making the hardware long overdue for a replacement.  

A list of affected Fermi GPUs is available to view here. 

You can join the discussion on Nvidia’s Fermi GPU architecture moving to legacy status on the OC3D Forums.Â