NVIDIA To Cease GPU Driver Support For Windows 7 And 8 By October 2021

Despite being several years old, NVIDIA is still releasing GPU driver updates for older Microsoft operating systems including Windows 7, 8 and 8.1. However, this will no longer be the case once October 2021 rolls in, as announced by the company via a newly published support page on its website.

“Effective October 2021, Game Ready Driver upgrades, including performance enhancements, new features, and bug fixes, will be exclusively available for systems utilizing Windows 10 as their operating system,” NVIDIA wrote. “Critical security updates will be available on systems utilizing Windows 7, Windows 8, or Windows 8.1 through September 2024.”

Seeing that current games and applications are only compatible with the current generation Windows systems, NVIDIA’s (and even Microsoft’s) decision to cease support for the older platforms shouldn’t be an issue to most users. That is, provided that they have already upgraded to the popular Windows 10 system, which will soon hit its six-year-old mark late next month.

NVIDIA Releases GeForce Driver 466.27 With New Anti-Ethereum Limiter

NVIDIA released its latest GeForce driver version 466.27 just yesterday. The driver ahead of next week’s launch of Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, but more importantly, it marks the brand’s second attempt at implementing its anti-Ethereum limiter for the GeForce RTX 3060.

As a quick recap, NVIDIA announced that the RTX 3060 family of graphics cards would feature a limiter that would dampen the card’s mining performance for the cryptocurrency. By doing this, it hoped that it would deter cryptominers from buying the card in bulk and leaving bonafide gamers empty-handed, as a result.

Unfortunately for NVIDIA, the GPU maker made a boo-boo less than a month after the RTX 3060 was launched, when it released a GeForce driver without the anti-Ethereum code, thus allowing miners to mine the cryptocurrency with total abandon. Among other creative methods, that is.

With the new driver version, NVIDIA is breathing new life into its anti-Ethereum miner code and based on its rather ambiguous blog post, it sounds as though driver version 466.27 is expected to be the minimum driver version for all GeForce RTX 30 series cards that ship out from mid-May onwards.

As to whether or not the new driver update will actually turn miners away from NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 30 series cards and, alternatively, turn them towards the brand’s CMP lineup, only time will tell.