This very popular Nvidia GeForce gaming GPU looks set to lose driver support

If you're still using an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060, and the Steam Survey suggests a lot of gamers currently are, then it looks as though you're about to lose driver support for this GPU. According to Nvidia, the forthcoming 580-series of Nvidia GeForce drivers will be the last branch that supports Maxwell and Pascal GPUs, which covers all GTX 900 and 1000 graphics cards, with the exception of the few GTX 1600-series cards that were based on the later Turing architecture.

The GeForce GTX 1060 has proved to have a surprising amount of staying power, and even now you'll regularly see this Nvidia GPU listed in the minimum system requirements for the latest games. It's also currently ranked 12th on the May 2025 Steam Survey out of all the GPUs used by gamers who took part in the last survey, with 2.24% share of the market. As a point of comparison, the highest-ranked RTX 5000-series GPU on the survey is the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070, with 0.71%. In fact, we ranked the aging GTX card number four on our guide to the best PC gaming hardware ever.

It looks as though the time is up for this GPU now, however, at least if you want updated drivers to play upcoming games. In a post on its developer forums, as spotted by X user Longhorn, Nvidia states that the "release 580 series will be the last to support GPUs based on the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures."

The post specifically refers to Unix drivers, but Nvidia's drivers follow the same numbering schemes and hardware support across all platforms, and it's very likely that Windows driver support for these GPUs will also cease after this point. We've reached out to Nvidia to clarify if this is indeed the case.

It wouldn't be a surprise if Windows driver support is about to be pulled for these GPUs, though. After all, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1000-series first came out in May 2016, over nine years ago, and companies usually stop providing driver support for older products after a certain amount of time - the company's previous Fermi and Kepler GPUs haven't had driver support for a long time now. AMD likewise doesn't support any GPUs before the Radeon RX 400-series range from 2016 with its current drivers either.

The difference this time is that, despite all the advances in ray tracing and DLSS, a nine-year-old GPU that doesn't support any of these features is still proving to be massively popular, and now it looks as though it's not going to get any new drivers. Nvidia is currently on driver version 576.88, and Maxwell and Pascal GPUs are likely to be supported by the whole of the 580 branch, meaning there will still be a good few months of driver support left for these GPUs.

If you think it might be time for an upgrade, though, then check out our guide to buying the best graphics card, which takes you through all the best options right now, based on reviews with rigorous benchmarks. If you're looking to swap out a GTX 1060, then read our AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT review, as this is the best GPU in that sector right now.

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