NVIDIA Confirms Plans To Drop "Kepler" GPU Driver Support

Last month we reported on CUDA documentation pointing to the NVIDIA 470 driver series to be the last supporting GeForce GTX 600/700 Kepler GPUs and that has now been summed up more formally with new guidance out of NVIDIA.

NVIDIA confirmed today that their R470 driver series is the last to support Kepler GPUs ranging from the low-end GeForce GTX 630 through the high-end GeForce GTX 780 Ti and GTX TITAN / TITAN Black / TITAN Z graphics cards. Sans the GeForce GTX 750 graphics cards that are actually Maxwell rather than Kepler.

The R470 driver series though will be a long-lived driver branch and so NVIDIA will support it with critical security updates through September 2024. In the case of their Linux driver, they routinely update their legacy/long-lived driver branches for new Linux kernel and X.Org Server compatibility as well so it will work in newer releases of major Linux distributions.

The updated guidance from NVIDIA is in relation to their Windows GameReady drivers and can be seen here but the same R470 series cut-off applies to their Linux (and BSD and Solaris) drivers too with their shared code-base.

The NVIDIA 470 driver series will be introduced this summer with Wayland improvements and a lot of other new features... This is going to be a big driver update and one of the most exciting out of NVIDIA in recent times for Linux users while for those on GeForce GTX 600/700 series does mean the end of the road.

The open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" Linux driver does have decent Kepler support that does allow re-clocking for semi-decent performance but that re-clocking needs to be done manually, there isn't any Nouveau Vulkan driver yet, etc. But at least their long-lived driver will still provide three more years of support to those rocking these now nearly decade old GPUs.