Nvidia announced that it plans to stop releasing Game Ready Drivers for its Kepler-series GPUs, which debuted in March 2012, in August so it can focus its efforts on more contemporary GPUs.
“Gaming technology has evolved dramatically with technologies like DirectX 12 Ultimate and NVIDIA DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling)” since Kepler’s debut, the company said in a support article. “Moving forward, NVIDIA’s software QA team will be focusing on hardware that supports newer technologies.”
Nvidia said the last Game Ready Driver for Kepler-series GPUs is set to be released on August 31; the first driver without support for the GPUs should arrive on October 4. From that point forward it will only release new drivers for GeForce 600-, 700-, or Titan-series graphics cards to address security flaws.
Companies often drop support for older products so they can focus on newer ones. Nvidia’s announcement is notable because it arrived shortly after MSI recently started to sell a GeForce GT 730 graphics card because even a seven-year-old GPU offers better gaming performance than a nonexistent one.
Buying one of those graphics cards also made slightly more sense before Nvidia’s announcement. They’re priced cheaply—MSI is selling them for about $42 in Japan—and were still receiving driver updates almost a decade after the Kepler architecture’s debut. Now, however, they have been given an expiration date.
Nvidia posted a list of all the desktop GPUs based on its Kepler architecture to its website. Those GPUs will receive “critical security updates” until September 2024, at which point they’ll be totally abandoned.
