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Industry observers note that apart from security updates, Nvidia is ending Windows 10 capability support—a major blow for gamers still on the much-beloved operating system. Even though Microsoft is providing security updates for Windows 10 until October 2027 via the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program, graphics card giant Nvidia is pulling out before then.
Industry observers note that according to this support page (spotted by Windows Current), Nvidia says: “After October 2026, Windows 10 driver support will transition to a quarterly security patch for a period of three years where critical bug fixes will be delivered to end users through October 2029.”.
The report highlights that in short, Windows 10 users who have GeForce graphics cards in their PCs will be left hanging in the cold soon. Practically speaking, this means Nvidia will no longer drop performance updates and fresh functions for its “Platform release Ready Drivers” and “Nvidia Lab Drivers” on Windows 10.
According to the latest update, at first, the publisher went along with Microsoft’s decision to extend support for Windows 10 by one year (from October 2025 to October 2026). However, Nvidia isn’t re-upping on that decision with Microsoft’s second extension. GeForce drivers on Windows 10 will only get security updates once every quarter between October 2026 and October 2029. Nvidia is one of the first major firms to drop Windows 10 support.
As part of the ongoing story, starting November 2029, GeForce drivers on Windows 10 will no longer receive any updates of any kind.
Industry observers note that however, if fresh bugs are discovered in them, Nvidia will no longer provide bug fixes or optimizations. This drawback is likely to grow more noticeable over time. Existing platform releases will continue to work on Windows 10 PCs.
As part of the ongoing story, this could mean that gamers on Windows 10 PCs are left to deal with performance issues or bugs in fresh system update titles on their own. This, in turn, is likely to lead to more gamers switching to Windows 11. Furthermore, Windows 10 users will not receive optimizations for newly dropped platform releases.
In a fresh development, this article originally appeared on our sister publication PC-WELT and was translated and localized from German.
As part of the ongoing story, he has been writing on almost all IT topics for around 25 years, covering everything from news to reviews and buying guides. Hans-Christian Dirscherl began his IT life with Autoexec.bat and config.sys, Turbo-Pascal and C, Sinix and Wordperfect.