Nvidia’s Kepler architecture was introduced to consumers in the spring of 2012 and replaced its predecessor, Fermi. With Kepler, the focus has been on energy efficiency, and architecture is primarily found in the Geforce GTX 600 series. Kepler was also used in the later GTX 700 series, with the exception of the Geforce GTX 750 and GTX 750 Ti that use the Maxwell architecture
Nvidia 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. They are reports Voronex. The Geforce R470 will be the last of the series drivers where the architecture is supported.
|
Graphic |
building |
Coda Jobs |
Another driver with support |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Geforce GTX 400 |
Fermi |
2.0 |
R390 |
|
Geforce GTX 600 |
Kepler |
3.0 / 3.2 |
R470 |
|
Geforce GTX 900 |
Maxwell |
5.0 / 5.2 / 5.3 |
Stream |
|
Geforce GTX 1000 |
Pascal |
6.0 / 6.1 |
Stream |
|
Geforce RTX 2000 |
Turing |
7.5 |
Stream |
|
Geforce RTX 3000 |
Ampere |
8.0 / 8.6 |
Stream |
* Nvidia Geforce GTX 750 Ti and GTX 750 are based on Maxwell architecture
The document currently deals only with dedicated data center hardware, but consumer cards from the Geforce GTX 600 and GTX 700 Series are not likely to be discontinued for this. The last series drivers to support “Fermi” architecture on the GTX 400 and GTX 500 series were the Geforce R390.
The current Geforce R465 series drivers currently support Kepler engineering graphics cards, but due to their sophistication, they are not always included, for example, in early improvements for new games. According to Steam hardware statistics for April 2021, the most popular card from both series potentially affected is the Geforce GTX 760, which 0.3 percent of users use. It follows a few lines below the GTX 660 at 0.28 percent.
The Geforce R470 series drivers are the so-called “Long Term Support Branch,” which means three years of continuous updates, in total until 2024. However, they are in the form of security updates and bug fixes and are rarely recent. The driver chain is updated. The full support doesn’t mean that graphics cards are no longer usable in games, but that they no longer receive updates to the latest titles. However, given the age and performance of graphics cards, this shouldn’t be much of an issue.
Still using a graphics card with Nvidia “Kepler” architecture?
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