Nvidia announced that it is ending driver support for 32-bit OSes effective this month. That means no more Game Ready driver updates or other performance enhancing driver releases, and also no bug fixes. The company will, however, release security updates as needed, through January 2019.
The same applies to Nvidia’s GeForce Experience software—it’s dropping 32-bit support, though “existing features and services such as optimal game settings will continue to work on Windows 32-bit operating systems,” the company noted.
This isn’t much of a surprise, both because the majority of users have long since updated to a 64-bit version of Windows, and also Nvidia stated in December of last year that this was going to happen. There isn’t much reason to roll with a 32-bit OS these days, save for older system with dated hardware or in rare cases where compatibility might be a concern. Most of those systems wouldn’t make for very good gaming boxes anyway.
In related news, Nvidia is also discontinuing GPU driver support for its Fermi-era graphics cards. This also goes into effect this month, and just as with 32-bit OSes, the only GPU updates for Fermi will be critical security patches through January 2019.
The first Fermi GPUs arrived in April 2010. They’re found in GeForce 400 and 500 series cards, such as the GeForce GTX 590 pictured at the top of this article. Fermi GPUs were built on a 40nm manufacturing process and have since been superseded by Kepler, Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta. Follow this link to see a full list of cards affected.
