Nvidia Moves Maxwell GPUs to Legacy

Just about 2 months ago, Nvidia launched their new GTX 1080 flagship graphics card. With the release of the Pascal-based GPUs, the older generation cards must inevitably receive reduced levels of support. The reduced level of support has now been made official with Nvidia declaring the older Maxwell based GTX 900 series legacy products on their website. As such, the Maxwell-based GPUs will now be using the legacy driver.

However, things aren’t quite that bad yet for those with older Nvidia GPUs. The latest 368.81 WHQL drivers continue to support cards like the GTX 980 and 970 with fixes and profiles for the latest games. Even though Maxwell might be legacy, even legacy cards get updates with even the GTX 400 series being able to use the latest driver. The key difference is that you’re more likely to just get fixes and likely fewer optimizations than the new Pascal based GPUs. Nvidia has tended to drop optimizations more quickly than AMD which has seen the once equal match between 680 and 7970 end in a victory for AMD.

This time around, things might go a bit better for Maxwell users. The main reason AMD cards have continued to see such gains is due to the shared GCN architecture that AMD is continuing to use, with optimizations for newer cards also benefitting older ones. The architectural changes between Kepler and Maxwell led to Kepler being unable to reap gains from Maxwell focused optimizations. With Pascal, the architecture is largely the same as Maxwell, so it shouldn’t take too much effort for Nvidia to port those optimizations to their older cards.

Honestly, with some Maxwell owners having owned their cards for less than a couple months, Nvidia should continue to optimize those cards for at least a decent while. Hopefully, that will be the case. What do you think about Nvidia moving their Maxwell based cards to legacy?