this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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They started 9 years ago, but they remained popular into 2020 and according to wikipedia the last new pascal model was released in 2022. The 1080 and the 1060 are both still pretty high up on the Steam list of the most common GPUs.
What model came out in 2022? The newest I could find was the GT 1010 from 2021 (which is more of a video adapter than an actual graphics card) but that's the exception. The bulk of them came out in 2016 and 2017 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/?f=architecture_Pascal
Hate to break it to ya, but 2020 was 5 years ago. More than half of these GPUs lifespan ago. Nvidia is a for profit company, not your friend. You can't expect them to support every single product they've ever released forever. And they're still doing better than AMD in that regard.
If nvidia had the pre-GSP cards' drivers opensourced at least there would be a chance of maintaining support. But nvidia pulled the plug.
Intel's and AMD's drivers in the Mesa project will continue to receive support.
For example, just this week: Phoronix: Linux 6.19's Significant ~30% Performance Boost For Old AMD Radeon GPUs These are GCN1 GPUs from 13yrs ago.
AMD did nothing to make their drivers better, Vale did.
Making them open to contributions was the first step, but ok I won't engage in this petty tribalism.
The topic was about nvidia's closed source drives.
Valve couldn't do the same for pascal GPUs. Nobody but nvidia has the reclocking firmware, so even the reverse engineered nouveau NVK drivers are stuck at boot clock speeds.
That's literally the point of open source though, both AMD and Intel rely on open source drivers, so anybody can fix a flaw they encounter without having to rely on the company to "consider allocating resources towards a fix for legacy hardware"