Nvidia refuses to support video cards based on Fermi architecture

GeForce GTX 580 on Fermi architecture: one of the video cards that is being removed from support

Nvidia has published a message about the termination of support for video cards on Fermi architecture. Starting in April 2018, Game Ready driver updates, including performance improvements, new features, and bug fixes, will be released only for the Kepler, Maxwell, and Pascal video cards.

Critical updates for Fermi will continue to be released until January 2019.

Also, from April 2018, support for 32-bit operating systems is discontinued . Nvidia warned about this in advance in December 2017.

New versions of 32-bit drivers will no longer be released, regardless of the model of the video card. Up to this point, Nvidia has released graphics drivers for 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD. Now only 64-bit versions remain. Nvidia noted that new drivers will not be installed and will not work on 32-bit operating systems in any way, and new features and improvements are not planned to be ported back to earlier versions of the Game Game Ready Driver.

As noted earlier, the refusal to support 32-bit systems is associated with their low prevalence. For example, according to Steam statistics, less than 2% of computers currently work under 32-bit OS. Obviously, the company does not want to scatter the efforts of developers to serve a small audience. Users of Nvidia video cards on 32-bit operating systems can only stop updating and work on older versions of drivers - they will continue to function normally. New features that Nvidia may introduce in future drivers will not be available to them.

As with video cards based on Fermi processors, only critical updates will be released for drivers for 32-bit operating systems until January 2019.


The current version of drivers 391.35 was released in March. After the published announcement, we can assume that the next version will no longer be in branch 390, but in the older one. Accordingly, support for Fermi GPUs and 32-bit operating systems will already disappear from this branch.

Refusal to support the whole architecture and the actual recognition of the outdated large line of graphics cards ( 72 models) Is a significant event. If you recall, the last time the entire architecture was removed from support in March 2014, when the D3D10 Tesla architecture was transferred to Legacy status after eight years of support. In fact, the Fermi architecture was also supported for about the same period. Although there is a difference in the duration of the Legacy status, during which the company promises to release critical updates. For D3D10 Tesla, this period was two years, while for Fermi it was only 10 months. This is not very good, given the fact that vulnerabilities in video drivers are increasingly being used for unauthorized access to the system through exploits. This is a convenient target for hackers, because video drivers are complex, released with closed source code and have extensive privileges in the system.