NVIDIA graphics cards over the years have gone through the proverbial driver chopping block many times. And if you’re still running some particularly old oneness, they’re going to be next.
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SANTA CLARA, CA – MAY 10: A sign is posted in front of the Nvidia headquarters on May 10, 2018 in Santa Clara, California. Nvidia Corporation will report first quarter earnings today after the closing bell.
The ones we’re talking about here are the aging NVIDIA GeForce 600 and 700 series of graphics cards, which are slated to lose official driver support with the upcoming driver release from Team Green, as reported by TechRadar. That means all graphics cards featuring the Kepler architecture, both desktop and laptop.
If you’re still using a GTX 750 Ti, you’re safe since that card is based on the Maxwell architecture.
Which graphics cards are these, exactly? If you own a gaming computer built in early 2012, you likely have them in there. A few notable examples would be the GTX 660 Ti, GTX 680, and the GTX 780 Ti.
There’s also the OG GTX Titan, if you were one of the lucky (or rich) few that got the old Kepler beast back when it was released.
According to a report by VideoCardz, the information actually comes not from a gaming-centric source, but a data center one. NVIDIA Data Center documentations, to be specific. But while it’s finally killing Kepler, the new R470 driver family is still going to maintain support for Maxwell and Pascal architectures.
Read also: NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti, 3070 Ti-Equipped Prebuilt PCs From Razer Are Now Available for PREORDER
NVIDIA And Its Currently Non-Existent Upgrade Path
With this news, anybody who’s still running a Kepler GPU will be put in a pretty bad place in two ways. One, the card will no longer get performance optimization for new games. And two, you can’t get a new one anyway because there’s a global GPU shortage. Yikes.
Unless you are willing to pay insane prices to get a new NVIDIA RTX graphics card (it’s even worse if you live in Europe), literally your only choice is to go for the secondhand market.
Yeah, it’s a bit sad, replacing an old GPU with another old one. But really, what can you do?
NVIDIA, though, is doing everything they can to try and get their newest products to GPU-starved gamers. Among their latest efforts include releasing low hash rate (LHR) versions of their RTX graphics cards in an attempt to sway cryptocurrency miners from buying them. To complement this, NVIDIA is also offering CMPs (crypto mining processors), which are graphics cards specifically designed for mining.
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Jen-Hsun Huang, president and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., holds up the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 graphics processor during the company’s event at the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S., on Sunday, Jan. 6, 2019. CES showcases more than 4,500 exhibiting companies, including manufacturers, developers and suppliers of consumer technology hardware, content, technology delivery systems and more.
Right now, though, things aren’t looking good. The RTX 3000 series is selling for double, triple, and sometimes even quadruple their MSRP because of the insane imbalance in supply and demand. Even old GPUs like those from the 10 series are marked up.
Stand Up And Take The Blow
When there’s no hope for an upgrade, people who are still running Kepler GPUs will need to make do with what they have, minus the latest driver optimizations. That’s just how it is these days. This truly is a GPU-pocalypse, and there’s barely any end in sight.
Related: NVIDIA RTX 3050, 3050 Ti FINALLY Spotted: Will Feature Prominently in Sub-$1000 Gaming Laptops First
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Written by RJ Pierce
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