News Nvidia ends support for DirectX 10 GPUs

Can't say I blame them. They release cards like chit through a goose so supporting all of them with one driver must be a right old Peter.

AMD ended support for the DX10 cards they made a while back too, removing any Crossfire support in later drivers.

I still think GPU producers should have separate teams of devs writing drivers for one specific core format (IE Kepler, Fermi etc).

 

The GTX 280 was one of the first products I reviewed at bit-tech, and I still have bit's old GTX 275 collecting dust on a shelf. Goodbye old soldiers.

 

I'm still running a 250GTS!

 

They were utter crap.

 

Still running an 8800 GT GS. Still don't have any real reason to upgrade yet though I might update the drivers soon, can't actually remember the last time I did that.

 

My 8800GT died of old age about a year ago. That was an awesome card, would still happily be running it now had it not expired

 

If any of you are using linux, they simply moved the DX10 cards to their "legacy" drivers. They still update those drivers, just not as frequently. So, if you'd like to keep using those GPUs in the years to come, this would be a good opportunity to give linux a shot. You're obviously most likely going to get a better experience with newer GPUs but linux works very nicely with nvidia. In fact they still support the GeForce 6 and 7 series.

I personally still own a 7900GTO, but it's currently in a staticproof bag sitting in a shelf. I wish it was CUDA compatible, because it'd make a great GPGPU - the core is still pretty good even for today's standards but 256MB of VRAM really isn't enough to play games, but sufficeint for non-gaming purposes.

 

Still use my BFG 8800 in a back up/emergency PC, I bought it new £140 and fitted a Zalman heatsink/fan to it, played over a 1000 hours of Oblivion with it, brilliant card, completely useless for today's AAA games of course but, Ah, the memories.

 

The only surprise to me is that they haven't discontinued them sooner - probably console ports were propping up the driver support?

I always perceived DX10 as bit of a mis-fire, not a massive jump over DX9, so not invested in, DX11 adding tesselation allowed console ports to be easier on the eyes, we'll finally say goodbye to DX9 games over the next 12-18mths though in favour for DX11 console ports....which should keep us going for the next 4 years lol.

 

I too am surprised they haven't done this sooner. The reason DX10 was a mis-fire is because MS didn't release DX10 for Windows XP, and, ATI took a relatively long time to add the support for it. Also, consoles didn't support the technology that DX10 offered so that also didn't really help much.

DX11 worked out because people were actually willing to switch to Windows 7 and the hardware performance was a big enough jump over the DX10 generation products. But, even DX11 is relatively uncommon.

 

I hate Nvidia drivers, I have to go way back to 314.22 for a driver that doesn't try to murder my GTX 560 Tis but doing that means I can't use SLI in some games.

 

They had done it sooner, just not officially. When BF3 launched I was running a triple screen Quad SLI PC (two GTZ 295 single PCB). BF3 did a lot of this....





I mean the shadows of course. So I waited for a fix. And waited, and waited. Nvidia just said that they pretty much couldn't be assed with older cards.

Not nice if I'd paid over five hundred notes per card and this wasn't even two years into their lifespan. Thankfully each card cost me peanuts but I was still rather cross over it.

 

I've got a perfectly functional GTX 275 laying about. It's got the oddball 768 MB of RAM. Last time I hooked it up was when I was first playing around with SLI with my 550s. Used the 275 as a dedicated PhysX card. Took it out when I dropped the 660s in.

 

If you have another PCIe slot you can still use it for physx. You don't need matching GPUs to accomplish this.

 

Still running a GT320 and a 7800GT here.

Of course, the only game I play is World of Tanks, and while I could use an upgrade, it's not a priority.

 

The joys of proprietary DX + driver model.

Having a locked down proprietary model allows a company to degrade performance in the latest drivers artificially... or end support altogether - despite the fully unified shader GPU microarchitectures being similar, there's no reason for G80 cards to become totally obsolete.

 

Maybe, but many a benchmark says you'll get the best performance by allowing the physx (when you're actually playing game that has some) run on the main card(s).

/JustSayin

 

I thought they already would have done this ages ago! AMD stopped updating it's DX10 cards atleast 18 months back.

 

Guys the Physx PPU seems to react to clock speed. So, putting a GTX 275 in as a Physx card when you are running a 1100mhz Kepler is a waste of time. It'll simply slow you down.

It seems Nvidia have piped the PPU onto the die itself, making it better with a better core (if that makes sense). I tried this theory a couple of years back and you were literally just adding a spare furnace to your rig for no gains whatsoever.

If you run SLI then setting it to the second GPU did seem to help matters, rather than letting the master GPU do all the work.