Goodbye Kepler: NVIDIA announces that GeForce GTX 600 and 700 series cards will stop receiving new Game Ready Drivers from August 2021

Nearly 9 years after the first Kepler card - the GeForce GTX 680 - debuted, NVIDIA has announced that it'll no longer be releasing newer Game Ready Driver updates for the entire lineup. In a customer support thread titled "Support Plan for Kepler-series GeForce GPUs for Desktop," NVIDIA outlined its intentions. Kepler cards will receive their final driver update on August 31st. Newer NVIDIA drivers will require a Maxwell series card at minimum to work. 

Kepler had a solid run. The architecture was at the heart of both the GeForce GTX 600 and GeForce GTX 700 series. The first three GTX Titan iterations - the GeForce GTX Titan, the GTX Titan Black, and the GTX Titan Z, were all Kepler parts. As NVIDIA's first foray into the 28nm process, Kepler also introduced GPU Boost, and delivered noticeably better temps and power efficiency than previous-gen Fermi hardware. 

The GeForce GTX 780 Ti, the flagship 700 series part, released in 2013, was particularly long-lived. The GTX 780 Ti delivered better performance than the eighth-gen consoles across the entire lifespan of the console generation. Few PC gamers out there are likely still rocking Kepler parts in their rigs. NVIDIA's decision to EOL Kepler could be the last nail in the coffin. Maxwell and 900 series parts will likely be next, though the GeForce GTX 980 Ti remains a formidable option at 1080p.