According to new rumors, NVIDIA may be planning to discontinue support for its GTX 600 and 700 series GPUs. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 600 and 700 series graphics cards are powered by its legacy Kepler GPU architecture. And if the rumors are true, the R470 driver could be the last one to support most of Nvidia’s GeForce 600 and 700 series graphics cards.
The news was posted by TechPowerUp who spotted an interesting entry in a data center document outlining Nvidia’s driver support roadmap. At the time, it showed Kelper being discontinued with Nvidia’s looming R470 driver stack. The driver stack is currently at R460.
And While the document is related to Nvidia’s data center products, if driver support ends on that side of the equation, the same would probably be true of its consumer offerings. The document shows it was last updated in April of last year, but there has been at least one recent change.
Looking at the document now, it no longer shows support ending for Kepler with the R470 driver stack, and instead lists support as “ongoing.” However, a visit to the Wayback Machine shows that R470 was listed as the end of the line as recently as this past Saturday.
It may be possible that NVIDIA has decided to continue on support for the 600 and 700 series GPUs given the current GPU landscape. Or since it’s supposedly been more than a year since the document was updated. Nvidia may have changed course some time ago, and just forgot to go in and make the correction until now.
As of the most current driver release (466.47 WHQL), Kepler is still supported, which means owners of graphics cards like the GeForce GTX 780 Ti are getting new features (as supported) and performance tweaks, just like owners of more recent GPUs. We will have to wait and see what NVIDIA is planning for these old Kepler cards.
