Nvidia stops supporting all 32-bit drivers

Nvidia Company on the official website of Nvidia Support announced the completion of support for graphics drivers for 32-bit operating systems, regardless of the model of the video card. That is, new versions of 32-bit drivers will not be released anymore. The latest will be the closest version of the 390.x GeForce Game Ready Driver driver for all supported systems.



Up to this point, Nvidia has released graphics drivers for 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD. Now only 64-bit versions will remain.



In an official message, the company notes that new driver versions will not be installed and will not be able to work on 32-bit operating systems, and new features and improvements are not planned to be ported back to the GeForce Game Ready Driver 390 or earlier.



However, Nvidia promises to release critical security updates for 32-bit drivers by January 2019.



Most likely, the refusal to support 32-bit systems is associated with their low prevalence. Now such systems are rare: for example, according to Steam statistics, at present less than 2% of computers work under 32-bit OS. Obviously, the company does not want to disperse the valuable efforts of developers to serve the marginal audience. Although the FreeBSD operating system has a smaller market share, fortunately, Nvidia does not remove it from support.



One way or another, but the few users of Nvidia video cards on 32-bit operating systems are left to sit on old drivers, which will continue to work in normal mode. New features that Nvidia may introduce in future versions of drivers will not be available to them.



In general, this is another reason to switch from a 32-bit operating system to a 64-bit version, especially since 64-bit applications are better than 32-bit in all respects: they are safer, faster and have no restrictions on the amount of data in memory inherent in 32 -bit addressing. Perhaps the only reason to stay on a 32-bit OS is the limitations of some specific old software (16-bit and 32-bit) or hardware, for which only 32-bit drivers exist. For example, for old Mustek scanners there are only 32-bit drivers, so these scanners turn into bricks under a 64-bit OS.



In addition, the company announced it will no longer support the following graphics cards:

• NVS 315
• NVS 310

After the driver GeForce Game Ready version 390, these products are generally removed from support. However, for them security updates will be released even longer than for 32-bit drivers. It is planned to release updates with the status of vulnerabilities from low to critical until December 2019, and critical updates will be released until December 2021.



NVS graphics cards are positioned as a standard business graphics for systems with multiple displays. The latest model in this series NVS 810 with 4 GB DDR3 memory supports connecting up to eight displays (eight mini DisplayPort connectors). In addition to the NVS 315 and NVS 310 cards removed from support, the company releases and continues to support the NVS 510 (maximum four displays) and NVS 810 models. Thus, the NVS 315 and NVS 310 video cards with support for only two displays are almost officially obsolete - and users pushing to buy newer models.



Finally, another news from Nvidia is the discontinuation of stereo support with Quadro quadruple buffering .



In particular, from the 396th version of the driver for Windows will no longer support the following functions:

• 3D DLP and Tridelity stereo image modes with access via user interface and NVAPI.
• NVAPI DirectX Stereo for Windows 10

The following software interfaces are excluded:

• NvAPI_D3D1x_CreateSwapChain ()
• NvAPI_D3D9_CreateSwapChain ()

Nvidia writes that after recompiling the application with unsupported features, they will start to produce the error “NVAPI_NOT_SUPPORTED”. As an alternative to stereo with fourfold buffering, it is recommended to switch to using Microsoft native stereo software interfaces (DXGI).



Returning to migration from 32-bit to 64-bit applications, it is worth recalling that Intel is going to abandon BIOS support by 2020 , leaving only a clean UEFI in the firmware. Thus, 16-bit and almost all 32-bit operating systems will not be able to run on modern hardware.