Nvidia has announced the end of support for DirectX 10 video cards, but you’ll be able to keep using your old clunkers for a good while yet.
If you’re still rocking a GeForce 9800 or GTX-295 in your PC gaming rig, the first thing you need to do is ask yourself, “Why?” Seriously, this is something you should put some thought into. And maybe you’ll find that you have a good reason for it; but you might also discover that it’s finally time to gird your loins and brace for an upgrade.
“Why?” Because Nvidia has announced that version 340 of its drivers will be the last to support DirectX 10 generation video cards. “The Release 340 drivers will continue to support these products until April 1, 2016, and the NVIDIA support team will continue to address driver issues for these products in driver branches up to and including Release 340,” Nvidia said on its customer support site. “However, future driver enhancements and optimizations in driver releases after Release 340 will not support these products.”
If there’s an upside to owning an 8800GTX in 2014, that would be it: You’ve got until the spring of 2016 to do something about it. And of course, you can keep on using it after that point, but with no further support or updates and presumably fewer and fewer games that will actually run on it.
The end of the line for legacy products will affect GeForce 8, 9, 100, 200, 300 and 400 series desktop hardware, GeForce 7, 8, 9, 100, 200 and 300 series notebook products, and a number of Tesla and Quadro products. The list in full is available from Nvidia.
