Nvidia is about to cease support for its graphics cards on 32-bit PCs

Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti

Following a declaration that it would stop releasing GeForce graphics card drivers for 32-bit operating systems, which came at the end of last year, Nvidia has confirmed that support will officially cease before the end of April.

This affects 32-bit versions of Windows 7, 8/8.1 and 10, as well as Linux and FreeBSD, although important security fixes will continue to be provided running through to the beginning of next year.

Nvidia noted that: “Game Ready Driver upgrades, including performance enhancements, new features, and bug fixes, will be available only on 64-bit operating systems. Critical security updates will be provided for 32-bit operating systems through January 2019.”

Legacy laggards

Of course, these days most folks are running 64-bit operating systems anyway, but if you have an Nvidia graphics card, and you still happen to be using a 32-bit OS for whatever reason – maybe you’re running legacy hardware with old drivers that won’t play nice with a 64-bit operating system – then obviously you need to think about an upgrade to your OS, and perhaps your hardware itself.

Making the move to 64-bit will be a boon in many ways, not just in terms of Nvidia’s drivers, but all-round on the security front. It should also allow you to gain likely considerable performance benefits from 64-bit software.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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