Posted on Friday, December 22 2017 @ 23:20 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
NVIDIA announces it will soon cease support for 32-bit operating systems. Starting with the upcoming GeForce 390 driver branch, the company will exclusively publish 64-bit drivers for Windows 7, Windows 8/8.1, Windows 10, Linux and FreeBSD. However, NVIDIA will make an exception for critical security flaws, those will be patched until January 2019.
After Release 390, NVIDIA will no longer release drivers for 32-bit operating systems1 for any GPU architecture. Later driver release versions will not operate, nor install, on 32-bit operating systems. Driver enhancements, driver optimizations, and operating system features in driver versions after Release 390 will not be incorporated back into Release 390 or earlier versions. This impacts the following operating systems:
Microsoft Windows 7
Microsoft Windows 8/8.1
Microsoft Windows 10
Linux
FreeBSD
NVIDIA intends to support critical driver security fixes until January 2019. For more details on product security, see http://www.nvidia.com/security.
Overall, this move shouldn't cause a lot of issues. Few gamers are still using 32-bit operating systems and those who do most likely run on old hardware. Processors without 64-bit support haven't been shipped since 2006 and these old PCs aren't able to play modern games anyway.
