The official release notes for Nvidia's CUDA 12.9 Toolkit explicitly indicate that the next major release will no longer support Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta-based GPUs. Note that this deprecation is only limited to the compute side, as these GPUs will likely continue receiving normal GeForce drivers for the time being. That being said, this is likely the last SDK version that can be used to develop CUDA applications targeting the aforementioned architectures.
While the previous release hinted at this change, Nvidia's stronger wording now serves as a definitive signal for developers to shift to more modern architectures. CUDA 12.x series (and before) will still allow application development for these GPUs. The deprecation targets offline compilation and library support. Essentially, future CUDA compilers (nvcc) will lack the ability to generate machine code compatible with these GPUs. In the same vein, upcoming versions of CUDA-accelerated libraries like cuBLAS, cuDNN, etc., will not offer support for GPUs built using these architectures.
