NVIDIA Pushes Final Security Driver for Maxwell and Pascal GPUs

NVIDIA has stayed in the spotlight recently, and not for reassuring reasons. Reports of an expected GPU shortage now look very real, as RTX 5070 Ti prices continue to surge at retailers. At the same time, NVIDIA has quietly delivered another major update that affects millions of older graphics cards.

The company has released a new driver that officially confirms the end of Game Ready performance updates for several legacy GPU architectures.

NVIDIA Publishes Driver Update for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta

According to Neowin, NVIDIA has published a security-only display driver for GeForce GPUs based on the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures. This update marks a clear shift away from performance tuning, feature additions, and game-specific optimizations for these older cards.

The new driver serves strictly as a software security update and applies only to GeForce GPUs based on the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures. NVIDIA does not include any performance improvements, game optimizations, or feature enhancements in this release. The update arrives as NVIDIA 582.28 WHQL and focuses exclusively on patching security vulnerabilities.

The 582.28 WHQL release addresses five high-severity vulnerabilities that could potentially impact affected systems: CVE-2025-33217, CVE-2025-33218, CVE-2025-33219, CVE-2025-33220, and CVE-2025-33237.

NVIDIA has not disclosed exploit details, but the severity rating makes this update strongly recommended for users still running these GPUs.

Known Issues Will Remain Unfixed

Because these architectures no longer receive Game Ready drivers, NVIDIA has confirmed that some known bugs will not be resolved:

• Counter-Strike 2: Text distortion when using non-native resolutions
• Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth: Light flickering on some systems after the update

Since performance and compatibility updates have ended, these issues are effectively permanent for affected hardware.

If you’re unsure whether your system falls into this category, the impacted series include:

• Maxwell: GeForce GTX 900 Series, GTX 700 Series
• Pascal: GeForce GTX 10 Series
• Volta: Titan V series

The oldest desktop GPUs still receiving full Game Ready driver support now come from the GTX 16 Series, NVIDIA’s last non-RTX lineup.

The 582.28 WHQL driver remains available for download from NVIDIA’s official website for users who need the latest security patches on legacy hardware.

Elsewhere, NVIDIA has signaled that the upcoming RTX 50 series will prioritize midrange GPUs for now. For users who can’t justify a GPU upgrade, there’s some good news too, as GeForce NOW is now available on Linux, offering another way to keep gaming without new hardware.