According to a recent report, Nvidia’s upcoming R470 graphics driver will be the last to support some of the company’s older graphics cards with performance optimizations, such as the GeForce GTX 600 and 700 series of GPUs.
As a result, if you’re playing one of those cards, keep that in mind (although note that the GTX 750 and its Ti variant are Maxwell, not Kepler). Of course, even the newer GTX 700 series is already eight years old, so it’s still a questionable proposition in terms of modern gaming.
The R470 driver family will be the last to support graphics cards made with the Kepler architecture. According to VideoCardz, which spotted Phoronix flagging this up courtesy of Nvidia’s data centre documentation. We’re currently using the R465 driver family, specifically version 466.47, which was released earlier this week, with R470 set to arrive in 2021, most likely soon.
Once Nvidia switches to the next driver generation (presumably R475) – perhaps by the end of 2021 or early 2022. The GTX 600 and 700 cards will no longer be supported in terms of game optimization, meaning they’ll eventually produce poorer results as time goes on.
However, keep in mind that for the R470 driver, these GPUs will be in LTS (long-term support), which means that while the driver may no longer cater to optimization needs, it will still provide security patches for any significant bugs that might arise in the future.
Nvidia will continue to have LTS coverage until 2024, keeping Kepler customers protected from security flaws for another two years. This means that GTX 600 graphics cards will be supported for a total of 12 years, which is a commendable amount of time.
Of course, Nvidia’s Maxwell GPUs, which include the GTX 750 and GTX 900 series cards, will be next in line for driver updates, although that shouldn’t happen for a while (likely a couple of years down the line).