Why did Nvidia stop supporting Geforce 7 sereis moble gpus's in 2009 ?

I have wonderd this forever as I have a Nvidia Geforce Go 7950 GTX in my xps m1710 which I love and it hasn't a driver update since 2009 ???? which is strange as my brothers mobile 8 series 8700m gt which is in his xps m1730 is less powerfull than my card yet still get's driver releases for him :/ its strange as I can get 40fps in 720p with Dirt 3 with settings on low. did NVidia stop supporting the mobile 7 series on purpose ???

 

They want you to buy a new computer with a new GPU.
Your brother's card may be weaker, but it supports unified shaders and DirectX10. Your card does not.

 

Why would you expect them to support your card? That thing is ancient...
- You seriously think a company should keep updating drivers for a card forever just because you don't want to upgrade?

Since your card there have been 8000, 9000, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600 and now 700 series.

Once drivers have been optimized as much as possible, why would you want them to keep releasing drivers for the sake of releasing drivers? And you really expect a company to release updated game profiles from games in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 for a card released in 2006?

Of course they stopped it on purpose!

 

no DX 10 support

 

As the others have said the nvidia drivers are all you need. I have an old m170 that I use at times and my wife has the same as you M1710 and I use the driver from nvidia on both.
I have not had any problems at all with the river in Windows and older games. I have Windows 7 on both. The driver will also work with Windows 8.

 

Yeah im not trying to bash Nividia or anything I was just curious as I doo still see plenty of life left in im xps m1710 :3

I read up about the driver thing and someone said "If it ain't broke don't fix it !" and its true the drivers are very stable, never had 1 problem with my computer.

 

How long do you expect them to support GPUs, exactly?

I have a Gen 1 XPS kicking around from 2004 with a Radeon Mobility 9700, should I expect AMD to write drivers for it? Your 1710 is almost as old as that.

 

But the 8xxx series was only one year after the 7xxx cards and apparently it's still getting new drivers, 3 years after support for the 7xxx series was dropped. Obviously there's a discrepancy there. I'd imagine that's why OP is asking.

 

Dude a $40 graphics card will probably be faster than your card. UPGRADE!

 

Because of the architecture change from 7000 to 8000 series GPU, going from the old pipelines with dedicated pixel and vexter shaders to unified shaders/programable processors.

Since that 8k series to current, they have been using "cuda" cores in different types and capabilities but similar in principle or their idea, which helps them develop the set of drivers for the type of architecture they use.

A similar thing happened with ATI when it moved to a similar stream processor architecture.

 

there is no need for him to upgrade he can still play all games out there except for the ones that needs DX10 or 11 as minimum. He can upgrade when the new generation comes out.

 

That's true, but it's also unreasonable to ask any company to continuously provide driver support for outdated hardware. I mean that for any and all computer hardware. That's his choice to not upgrade and I can understand considering I believe companies treat mobile users as second class citizens compared to desktop or even tablets/smartphones. But it's also only fair for those who do buy the latest that Nvidia/AMD/Intel invest their resources to those who continue to support them financially.

 

Erekson7, Just enjoy your laptop. The drivers form nvidia are fine, the newer driver are for newer hardware that your laptop does not support.

 

Yeah I love my laptop and I plan on keeping it wayyyy past this generation. Its like a gaming generation of laptops you get it at launch and can still game 7 years later in 2013 and it looms brand new has all stickers and everything I really should post photos but yeah when I see enough new next gen games im interested in I will buy either a asus or alienware. But for now world in conflict and dirt 3 is all I need :3 and soo many games on steam I want to still play I might takes years befor I choose to upgrade !