Older graphics cards from Nvidia will soon lose support.
Support for some of Nvidia’ s legacy graphics cards is being discontinued. In the latest release of CUDA, they are described as obsolete.
Still to be used
The release notes for CUDA 12.8 state that “support for Maxwell, Pascal and Volta is considered ‘feature complete.'” That decision will likely impact data centers and scientific bodies that still use these graphics cards. The oldest architecture is in its 11th year this year.
According to Nvidia, the cards will last for a while, but will no longer receive new features or updates. That could lead to compatibility issues. Graphics drivers for Maxwell will still be supported for now, but Nvidia ended support for the older Kepler architecture as early as 2021. So the end is also in sight for Maxwell.
CUDA 12.8 additionally removes support for older operating systems, including Windows 10 21H2 and Debian 11. However, the cards are still widely used. For example, the Nvidia V100 series was used to train OpenAI’s GPT 3.5. That model ran the first version of ChatGPT.
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