Nvidia has made it known that as of now (April 2018) they are dropping driver and BIOS support for performance tweaks, feature upgrades, and bug fixes on all Fermi-based graphics cards. This is standard practice as a GPU design ages and the install base drops, and the time is better spent focusing on the newer microarchitectures. Critical security updates will still be provided for Fermi series cards until January 2018. Full support continues for Kepler, Maxwell, and Pascal series GPUs.
Fermi was initially released in 2010 as the primary architecture of the 400 series and was later used as the primary architecture of the 500 series too. Due to the GPU industry trend of reusing older designs to produce entry-level cards, Fermi continued alongside Kepler in the 600 series on desktop and mobile, as well as the 700 and 800 mobile series on notebooks.
Fermi series cards will continue to work as usual, but there won’t be any new game-specific driver tweaks for performance, or fixes for visual bugs unless that bug also affects a later microarchitecture.
A full list of Fermi-based GeForce graphics cards:
400 Series | 500 Series | 600 Series | 700 Series | 800 Series | 900 Series |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
410M | 510 | 605 | 705A | 800M | 910M #1 |
GT 415M | GT 520 | 610M | 705M | 810M | |
GT 420 | GT 520M | 620M | 710A | 820A | |
GT 420M | GT 520MX | GT 610 | 710M | 820M | |
GT 425M | GT 525M | GT 620 | 720A | GT 820M | |
GT 430 | GT 530 | GT 620M | 720M | ||
GT 435M | GT 540M | GT 625 | GT 705 | ||
GT 440 | GT 545 | GT 625M | GT 710M | ||
GT 445M | GT 550M | GT 630 | GT 720A | ||
GTS 450 | GT 555M | GT 630M | GT 720M | ||
GTX 460 | GTX 550 Ti | GT 635M | GT 730 | ||
GTX 460 SE | GTX 555 | GT 640 | |||
GTX 460 v2 | GTX 560 | GT 645 | |||
GTX 460M | GTX 560 SE | GTX 670M | |||
GTX 465 | GTX 560 Ti | GTX 675M | |||
GTX 470 | GTX 560M | ||||
GTX 470M | GTX 570 | ||||
GTX 480 | GTX 570M | ||||
GTX 480M | GTX 580 | ||||
GTX 485M | GTX 580M | ||||
GTX 590 |
#1 Thanks to Sukhoi for pointing out that we had missed the GeForce 910M from this list, a rebranded GeForce 820M using the Fermi microarchitecture.
Source(s)
Thanks to an anonymous reader for bringing this to our attention.