How long will NV support 6- and 7-series cards, with their "unified" drivers?

[VirtualLarry]

Just curious. Seems like there are still vendors selling AMD 6150-based mobos around.

Wondering if dropping 6- and 7-series support from the drivers would help things at all.

ATI dropped their cards that existed prior to unified shaders from their drivers.

 

[nenforcer]

None of the 6 and 7 series cards get all of the effort and development that CUDA has brought since the release of the 8 series cards.

There is probably a substantial percentage of users (like myself) using Windows XP DirectX9 which is why you still see driver updates for Geforce 6 and 7 owners on XP.

The 175.19 drivers were the last for the Geforce 2, 3, 4 and 5 and you can still download those.

What is the cutoff for Windows AERO support? The Geforce 6 and 7 meet the minimum hardware requirements to support AERO which is probably why they are still supported even though they obviously don't support DirectX 10 on Vista/7.

I think you will probably see with the release of Windows 8 Microsoft will change the hardware requirements so that something like only DirectCompute GPGPU supported devices will be allowed, so Geforce 8 and above.