First reported by Tom's Hardware, the patch notes for the latest update to Nvidia's CUDA Toolkit state that support for the Maxwell and Pascall architectures—GTX 9 and 10-series cards—will be deprecated in an upcoming update.
Those cards will still be getting GeForce driver updates, and while Nvidia has not yet announced for how long, we can look back at the mothballing of a previous Nvidia architecture to get an idea.
The news comes from the update 12.8 release notes for the CUDA Toolkit, Nvidia's collection of tools and libraries for programming GPU-powered applications.
Under section 1.5.1, «Deprecated Architectures,» the patch notes read: «Architecture support for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta is considered feature-complete and will be frozen in an upcoming release.» Volta was almost exclusively used in enterprise hardware, but Maxwell and Pascal are of dear importance to PC gamers: The 9 and 10-series cards represent a price vs.
performance golden age in hindsight, with the GTX 970, 980 Ti, 1060, and 1080 Ti in particular being fondly remembered cards that could reasonably support a gaming hobby to this day, depending on what graphical and resolution compromises you're willing to make.