The outfit had already muttered that the 580 branch would be the last to carry GRD updates for those ageing architectures. Yesterday’s launch of the 590 drivers confirmed it. The new branch only supports the GeForce 16 series and newer, covering Turing, Ampere, Ada Lovelace, and Blackwell, while everything older gets shoved into the legacy drawer. Nvidia pulled the same stunt on Linux earlier.

This does not mean the cards drop dead. They will still receive security updates as needed, but anyone sticking with pre-GeForce 16- or 20-series hardware should know they will not see another game-ready release.

Nvidia published long lists of the GPUs that still make the cut in the 590 and newer branches, spanning everything from RTX 5090 at the top of the Blackwell stack to the humbler Turing-based GTX 1650 on mobile. The desktop list looks like a museum tour of modern Nvidia architectures, though Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta now sit firmly on the outside, looking in.

The company added that the GeForce 16 series will be the final surviving GTX range to get GRD updates. From here on, only Turing, Ampere, Ada Lovelace, and Blackwell silicon will receive the complete driver treatment, which means anyone still nursing an older card should brace for a slow fade.