“The last Kepler driver will be released in August”

“Ampere”, “Turing”, “Pascal” and “Maxwell” – Nvidia’s architectures that share names with historical scientists are many. Before “Maxwell” and the Geforce GTX 900 series, “Kepler” was used as a code name and under this flag are the majority of Geforce GTX 700 cards, GTX 600 and the first really porky models with the Titan stamp.

At the end of May, Nvidia’s documentation indicated that the graphics cards would be without drivers during the year, and now the company confirms that this will be the case. Game ReadyThe driver with version number R470 GA5 will be the last to support “Kepler” cards and this will be released on August 31st. However, this does not mean that the cards will become unusable and the necessary security updates will be rolled out until September 2024.

Kepler-based desktop GPUs initially launched in March of 2012. Since then, gaming technology has evolved dramatically with technologies like DirectX 12 Ultimate and NVIDIA DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling). Moving forward, NVIDIA’s software QA team will be focusing on hardware that supports newer technologies.

Nvidia explains that the real technical development that has taken place since the “Kepler” debut in 2012 justifies that the company instead invests its resources in software support for more modern hardware, which for example works with DLSS and DirectX 12 Ultimate. Thus, Nvidia leaves about twenty cards without future optimizations, but it can be added that the old popular low-cost cards Geforce GTX 750 and the Ti sibling survive, because they have “Maxwell” under the shell.

That great progress has been made in the last decade cannot be denied, but for those who sit on one of the top cards from the “Kepler” era, it is not necessarily the case to search for replacements with lights and lanterns, if the demands are not so high. When SweClockers put the Geforce GTX 690, GTX 680 and GTX Titan under the microscope during the anniversary year 2019, it became clear that the cards can at least rattle off frame rates in the range 30-60 FPS, when 1080p resolution and games like Destiny 2 and Battlefield 1 are picked out.

Did you own a “Kepler” card, or do you still use one? Tell us in the comments thread!