NVIDIA has officially discontinued specific game-ready driver support for the Kepler Family of GPUs manufactured since 2012. Today, driver support for the GeForce GTX 600 series, as well as a hefty portion of the GeForce 700 series GPUs, has officially been discontinued.
Farewell Kepler GPUs - NVIDIA Discontinues GeForce GTX 600 and 700 Series Game Ready Driver Support
Today, NVIDIA released the first driver from their 495 branch, which dropped support for any Kepler family graphics processors.
The following list of cards are no longer supported by NVIDIA:
- TITAN family of GPUs: GeForce GTX TITAN, GeForce GTX TITAN Black, GeForce GTX TITAN Z
- GeForce 700 series of GPUs: GeForce GTX 780 Ti, GeForce GTX 780, GeForce GTX 770, GeForce GTX 760, GeForce GTX 760 Ti (OEM), GeForce GT 740, GeForce GT 730, GeForce GT 720, GeForce GT 710
- GeForce 600 series of GPUs: GeForce GTX 690, GeForce GTX 680, GeForce GTX 670, GeForce GTX 660 Ti, GeForce GTX 660, GeForce GTX 650 Ti BOOST, GeForce GTX 650 Ti, GeForce GTX 650, GeForce GTX 645, GeForce GT 640, GeForce GT 635, GeForce GT 630
The only GeForce 700 series GPUs that will still maintain support are the GeForce GTX 750 Ti, GeForce GTX 750, and GeForce GTX 745. These series are all based on NVIDIA's Maxwell architecture, and not the previous Kepler architecture.
Kepler is the codename for a GPU microarchitecture developed by NVIDIA, first introduced at retail in April 2012, as the successor to the Fermi microarchitecture. Kepler was Nvidia's first microarchitecture to focus on energy efficiency. Most GeForce 600 series, most GeForce 700 series, and some GeForce 800M series GPUs were based on Kepler, all manufactured in 28 nm. Kepler also found use in the GK20A, the GPU component of the Tegra K1 SoC, as well as in the Quadro Kxxx series, the Quadro NVS 510, and Nvidia Tesla computing modules. Kepler was followed by the Maxwell microarchitecture and used alongside Maxwell in the GeForce 700 series and GeForce 800M series.
The architecture is named after Johannes Kepler, a German mathematician and key figure in the 17th century scientific revolution.
— Wikipedia
NVIDIA Kepler series GPUs will still be offered security updates at this time. However, NVIDIA has chosen to continue offering bug fixes, enhancements to performance, any additional feature support in the future, as well as "day-0 game support" for their Maxwell, Pascal, Turing, and Ampere lines of graphics cards.
About the author: Jason R. Wilson is a member of the Hardware news team at Wccftech. Equipped with a background in graphic design and writing, Jason works daily to improve his craft and continues to create new and innovative ideas every day.
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