Nvidia refuses to support video cards on the architecture of Fermi

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

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

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

Also since April 2018, support for 32-bit operating systems has ceased . Nvidia warned this in advance in December 2017.

New versions of 32-bit drivers will not be released anymore, regardless of the video card model. Up to this point, Nvidia has released graphics drivers for 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD. Now only 64-bit versions will remain. Nvidia noted that new driver versions will not be installed and will not be able to work on 32-bit operating systems, and new features and improvements are not planned to be ported back to the GeForce Game Ready Driver earlier versions.

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

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


The current driver version 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 graphics processors based on the Fermi architecture and 32-bit operating systems will disappear from this branch.

Refusal to support the whole architecture and the actual recognition of an outdated large line of video cards ( 72 models ) is a significant event. If you recall, the last time the whole architecture was removed from the support in March 2014, when the D3D10 Tesla architecture was transferred to the status of “Legacy” after eight years of support. In fact, the architecture of Fermi was also supported for about the same period. Although there is a difference in the duration of the status of "Legacy", during which the company promises to issue critical updates. At D3D10 Tesla, this period was two years, while Fermi - 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, are available with closed source code and have extensive privileges in the system.