NVIDIA will soon end support for Windows 7 and 8

Windows 10 has been available for almost six years now, and even though some people are still using older versions of Microsoft’s operating system, Windows 10 is increasingly becoming the only option with up-to-date software. Several companies and popular applications have recently dropped support for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1, and now NVIDIA is next to say goodbye to older Windows releases.

Even though many new games only run on Windows 10, NVIDIA has continued to release driver updates for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1. That will change later this year, when the company will drop support for all three releases.

“Effective October 2021,” NVIDIA said in a new support page, “Game Ready Driver upgrades, including performance enhancements, new features, and bug fixes, will be exclusively available for systems utilizing Windows 10 as their operating system. Critical security updates will be available on systems utilizing Windows 7, Windows 8, or Windows 8.1 through September 2024.”

The lack of new driver updates after October shouldn’t break any existing games, but it does mean that new enhancements NVIDIA plans to bring to its drivers and desktop software will only appear on Windows 10. Newer graphics cards that require drivers released after October also won’t function on Windows 7, 8, or 8.1. However, many recent NVIDIA cards already didn’t fully work on older versions — ray tracing features on 3000-series GPUs are only available on Windows 10, for example.

NVIDIA also said it would end driver updates for Kepler-series GeForce graphics cards, which includes the GTX 600/700 lines and the original GTX Titan/Titan Black/Titan Z.

Although Windows 11 is on the horizon, support for Windows 10 will likely continue for many years from now.

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