NVIDIA’s latest GeForce Game Ready Driver update notes come with some sad news. After more than a decade of loyal service, NVIDIA’s Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta graphics cards will no longer receive the same supporting updates as newer cards.
NVIDIA plans to release one more major driver update for these architectures in October 2025, and after that, they will drop down to quarterly security updates. This scheduling lines up with Windows 10’s own end-of-life date, which falls on October 14, 2025.
The quarterly security updates for these GPU architectures will continue for a full three years through October 2028, says NVIDIA, but the usual “Game Ready” updates containing new features and optimizations will no longer apply.
Here’s the quote from the NVIDIA blog:
After a final Game Ready Driver release in October 2025, GeForce GPUs based on Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures will transition to receiving quarterly security updates for the next three years (through October 2028). Our support lifetime for these GPUs reaches up to 11 years, well beyond industry norms.
Andrew Burnes, NVIDIA
NVIDIA’s GPUs using the Maxwell architecture were first introduced in 2014, more than 11 years ago. They kicked off with GTX 700-series models and concluded with the GTX 900-series hardware, including my beloved GTX 980 Ti Founders Edition unit that I hope is still in use somewhere.
NVIDIA switched to the Pascal architecture in 2016 with the launch of the GTX 10-series cards, and this architecture only stuck around for one glorious generation.
The Turing architecture, the first with ray tracing acceleration, was introduced alongside NVIDIA’s RTX 20-series GPUs, which have evolved through 30- and 40-series hardware into the RTX 50-series Blackwell cards released in 2025.
As for the Volta architecture, it arrived in 2017 and was confined to Titan, Quadro, and Tesla workstation GPUs.
While the Maxwell cards have pretty much aged out at this point, NVIDIA’s Pascal hardware is still in use by plenty of gamers. That’s not great. A look at Steam’s hardware survey has the GTX 1060 at number 12 on the overall list, powering 2.15% of PCs in June 2025.
To put that into perspective, the most popular GPU — NVIDIA’s RTX 4060 Laptop card — has a 4.99% usage rate in the last poll.
There are undoubtedly thousands of gamers still working with a Pascal card, but keep in mind that a lack of feature updates isn’t going to brick your card. They might not be as stable as before, but you should be able to continue gaming without much hassle.
It was also announced in the same breath that NVIDIA plans to extend Windows 10 Game Ready driver support for its newer RTX GPUs until October 2026, a full year after Windows 10’s end-of-life date.
Also, we’re extending Windows 10 Game Ready Driver support for all GeForce RTX GPUs to October 2026, a year beyond the operating system’s end-of-life, to ensure users continue to receive the latest day-0 optimizations for new games and apps.
Andrew Burnes, NVIDIA
That’s good news for those who refuse to (or cannot) switch over to Windows 11. With only about a month and a half left of full Windows 10 support remaining, many users are scrambling for an exit strategy.
👉 Related: Windows 10 is dead: Here’s why it makes sense to buy a Snapdragon X PC for an upgrade to Windows 11
Those who decide to hold on — I haven’t yet switched over my main gaming PC from Windows 10 to Windows 11 — can at least have a nice little grace period to figure out a plan forward.
NVIDIA is being rather generous with its updates. No hardware can remain supported forever, and the fact that Maxwell cards have continued to receive regular updates for 11 years is applauded.
