Farewell Maxwell And Pascal
The most recent driver updates from NVIDIA, which arrived with the RTX 5090, suggest that there will be no updates for Maxwell, Pascal and Volta era GPUs. The practice of companies no longer providing driver updates for old hardware is not new, but there is a reason this one is worth mentioning. The GTX 1060 sat at the top of the Steam Hardware Survey for around five years and still holds 12th place, above any card from AMD or Intel.
The GTX 1080 and 1080 Ti don’t account for a large portion of the market, but there are a lot of them out there used by gamers that haven’t been able to afford an update. The GTX 1650 is based on the Turing architecture, so the fourth most popular GPU on Steam will continue to work.
NVIDIA doesn’t currently offer an affordable version of their newer architectures, which could lead to an interesting shift in the market. If you set a hard budget of $200 or less then your choices range from an RX 580, an RTX 2060 or and RTX 3050 6GB edition; none of these are particularly attractive choices. If you can swing $300 then an RTX 3060 12GB is in reach if it is on sale, otherwise your stuck with an RTX 3050 8GB card.
That could help both AMD and Intel grab some market share away from NVIDIA, especially as stocks of older NVIDIA GPUs deplete.
