Nvidia Geforce GTX 600 and GTX 700 "Kepler" soon without new drivers

Nvidia’s Kepler architecture was introduced to consumers in the spring of 2012 and replaced its predecessor Fermi. With Kepler, the focus was on energy efficiency, and the architecture is found mainly in the Geforce GTX 600 series. Kepler was also used in the subsequent GTX 700 series, with the exception of the Geforce GTX 750 and GTX 750 Ti which use the Maxwell architecture

Nvidia’s document “Updated Software Support Matrix tables for data center GPUs” states that after nine years, the company plans to stop including Kepler-based graphics cards in future drivers. It reports Phoronix. The last driver series where the architecture is supported will be the Geforce R470.

Grafikserie	Architecture	CUDA functions	Last driver with support
Geforce GTX 400 Geforce GTX 500	Fermi	2.0	R390
Geforce GTX 600 Geforce GTX 700 *	Kepler	3.0 / 3.2 3.5 / 3.7	R470
Geforce GTX 900	Maxwell	5.0 / 5.2 / 5.3	Current
Geforce GTX 1000	Pascal	6.0 / 6.1	Current
Geforce RTX 2000	Turing	7.5	Current
Geforce RTX 3000	Ampere	8.0 / 8.6	Current

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* Nvidia Geforce GTX 750 Ti and GTX 750 are based on the Maxwell architecture

The document currently only deals with hardware intended for data centers, but it is not unlikely that the consumer cards from the Geforce GTX 600 series and GTX 700 series will be retired in connection with this. The last driver series to support the “Fermi” architecture in the GTX 400 series and GTX 500 series was the Geforce R390.

The current driver series Geforce R465 currently supports Kepler architecture graphics cards, but due to its age, they are not always included in, for example, early optimizations for new games. According to Steam hardware statistics for April 2021, the most popular card from both potentially affected series is the Geforce GTX 760 used by 0.3 percent of users. It follows a few lines down the GTX 660 by 0.28 percent.

The Geforce R470 driver series is what is called a “long term support branch”, which means three years of continued updates, in total until the year 2024. However, it is in the form of security updates and bug fixes and more rarely than current driver series are updated. Completed support does not mean that the graphics cards become unusable in games, but that they no longer receive updates for newer titles. However, given the age and performance of graphics cards, this should not be a major problem.

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Are you still using a graphics card with Nvidia’s “Kepler” architecture?