The Nvidia Geforce GTX 400 and 500 series will be without Vulcan support

One of the advantages highlighted with both DirectX 12 and Vulkan is that the ability to work “close to the hardware” does not require new hardware, something that at least in theory opens up for support with older graphics circuits. This prompted Nvidia to first promise support for DirectX 12 with the Geforce GTX 400 and GTX 500 families, a promise that was withdrawn at the end of 2015.

It now appears that the same also applies to the alternative interface Vulkan, which succeeds OpenGL. As Vulkan is compatible with OpenGL, there are no technical obstacles to the graphics cards from the Geforce GTX 400 and GTX 500 series not receiving support, something Nvidia is also open with.

Support for Vulkan would be available in the form of updated drivers, and the reason why Nvidia’s decision not to provide support is attributed to the fact that too few customers use such old graphics cards today. This is what an Nvidia representative claims in a video episode with Khronos Group, the organization behind OpenGL and Vulkan.

We are currently not planning to support for 4-500 class GPUs, it is not an engineering issue but an install base issue. If that causes you pain please contact your local Nvidia representative and let them know.

It is worth noting that AMD’s Vulcan support requires graphics cards based on the Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, which means the Radeon HD 7000 family that was released during the same period as the Kepler-based Geforce GTX 600 series.