Have Nvidia ever been customer focused? Seems they've gone downhill since the GTX days. I really hope AMD deliver something killer come Nov 3rd. It's sorely needed.
I'd say Maxwell/Pascal were customer focused products.
After 6-8 years, they still run latest ports fine, without issues, and with good enough performance. These cards also do not appear to be degrading in terms of performance. When compared to Fermi/Kepler which was made obsolete in mere couple years, these cards aged very good. At this point, they're still consistently performing whereas older GCN cards such as RX 580 is having troubles in certain games. For example GCN cards have terrible performance in Halo Infinite, graphical bugs in Spiderman, and so on. Whereas Pascal GPUs perform like they should without graphical errors in both titles. The amount of problematic titles on GCN has increased in recent 2 years whereas Pascal, also thanks to its huge userbase, probably gets a decent amount of "optimization" focus from developers, since they can't also realistically ignore them. RTX cards are one thing, but Pascal GPUs, especially ranging from 1050ti to 1080ti has a huge presence in gaming PCs, even today.
Also, Pascal had ample amount of VRAM, midrange ones having 6 GB to high end ones having 8 GB, even the 1070 had 8 GB VRAM, which helped the card to endure all those years at ultra textures / high settings. Imagine a 1070 being 6 GB, or a 1060 being 4 GB, you would have to sacrifice more than your card is capable of.
GTX 970 is an outlier, but the fact that the defective 500 mb is already used by background apps, it is another reason why GTX 970 also survived all those years without huge performance drops. Only thing you have to do with that card is to keep your expectations in check and use optmized settings and where needs be, use a tad bir lower texture resolution setting. 980/980ti are still decent, and perform similar to their Pascal counterparts.
So yeah. They did become customer friendly with those. Gamers also awarded them, I mean look at how much hold Pascal has over Steam surveys. The hold is too strong that developers cannot still leave those GPU lines behind. The other reason why they also aged good because Nvidia did not design them in a way that they were dependent on "game ready" drivers unlike Kepler and Fermi. You can run RDR2 on a Pascal GPU with a 2017 driver and you would most likely get the same performance you get with an updated 2020-post-RDR2 driver. This alone proves that Pascal and above did not need GRD drivers at all. Kepler/Fermi actually needed drivers to get advertised performances. You literally actually had to update your GPU. They were amazingly reliant on NVIDIA's engineers to tweak game by game. Their design was made in a way that only NV knew how to maximize its performance potential. This design alone is anti consumer, considering they have the power to scrape entire architectures every 2 years. So leaving that design alone in favor of more generalized compute cards in Maxwell and Pascal was also huge steps towards being somewhat "customer" friendly.
Those are all I can remember. From what I'm seeing Turing and Ampere also feels like they're not dependent on driver optimizations, thankfully, so as long as they have a hold on gaming community, these cards should last very long into the generation.
Only thing I'm suspicious is Ray Tracing. Ray Tracing on Spiderman only works with their latest GRD driver, which could have a reasoning that they had to optimize Ray Tracing specifically to perform good with Turing/Ampere's way of doing ray tracing. Maybe in that respect, they might get obsolete in terms of performance if ray tracing implementations in future will require special care from developers or NVIDIA's side. But that's just theoritical guess at this point. There are also newer Ray Tracing games that worked well on older drivers, so I'm not quite sure on that front either.