Heads Up: NVIDIA Preps Its Final Game Ready GPU Driver For Windows 10

If you're still running Windows 10 on your gaming PC, I don't blame you, but you should be aware that Microsoft has terminated mainstream support for your operating system. Unless you've signed up for Extended Security Updates, you're running a dangerously unpatched system. The next hurdle coming your way is the end of NVIDIA GeForce driver support. NVIDIA says that the final Game Ready Driver for Windows 10 will be released in October of this year, and starting in November, the Game Ready Drivers will require Windows 11.

Strictly speaking, this isn't exactly news because NVIDIA posted about this well more than a year ago. At that time, the company actually intended to end driver support on October 14th 2025, which was the cutoff for Windows 10 mainstream updates. However, the vast proportion of GeForce users still running Windows 10 persuaded the company to push the cutoff forward by a year. That deadline is now approaching, so consider this a public service announcement.

What are your options? Well, you can continue using Windows 10 until the cutoff for your version, which will be October of next year if you're on the Consumer ESU program, October of 2028 if you're on the Commercial ESU, or January 13th 2032 if you're on the Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 branch, which is the absolute hard cutoff for any official OS build based on Windows 10. You may not want to stick with your current OS and graphics card that long, though, because NVIDIA is only doing security updates for Windows 10 through October 2029.


It's hard to criticize NVIDIA for this policy, but at the same time, it's interesting to compare against Intel and AMD, neither of which have any official policy, at least publicly. AMD actually removed Windows 10 from its "Compatible Operating Systems" in its driver documentation starting with the Adrenalin 25.10 series drivers, but you can continue to download and install the latest drivers on Windows 10, it's just that they may or may not be officially supported. It's more likely that your current AMD GPU will be sunsetted before AMD actually blocks installation on Windows 10, because AMD tends to do that on a relatively quick schedule; the RDNA 2-based Radeon RX 6000 GPUs are already moved to "maintenance mode".

Realistically speaking there will almost assuredly be some reason that drives you to move to a new operating system before 2032, if not before 2029. Whether it's newer software that starts breaking on your old kernel, or a new machine with some other piece of hardware that doesn't work on Windows 10, it is an eventuality you should be prepared for. Make sure you have backups of your critical data, and if you're moving to Linux to avoid Windows 11 as many are, make sure your most important software remains compatible with the new OS.