TL;DR: Nvidia announced months ago that it would stop releasing Game Ready drivers for the almost decade-old Kepler graphics cards this year, but it seems today is the day. The Keplers are absent from the list of GPUs supported in the latest update.
The main stories in the latest Nvidia driver release are the optimization support for the newly released Back 4 Blood and the addition of DLSS to 10 more games. Buried within, however, are the details of the end of Kepler support as well as the end of support for Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1.
This means Kepler cards will no longer get driver improvements, performance improvements, new features, or bug fixes. Though, they will still get critical security updates through September 2024. Nvidia has a list of which GPUs this covers here, but it includes GTX 600 and GTX 700 series cards along with the early Titans, cards that originally came out in 2012 and 2013. This is the full list of affected cards:
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN Z
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN Black
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 Ti
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 (192-bit)
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 Ti OEM
- NVIDIA GeForce GT 740
- NVIDIA GeForce GT 730
- NVIDIA GeForce GT 720
- NVIDIA GeForce GT 710
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 645
- NVIDIA GeForce GT 640
- NVIDIA GeForce GT 635
- NVIDIA GeForce GT 630
The bottom of the download page for the latest driver does mentions exceptions for certain notebooks.
It should be noted that three 700 series GPUs are still getting support because they aren't Kepler but rather part of the following architecture, Maxwell. They are the GTX 750 Ti, GeForce GTX 750, and GeForce GTX 745 (OEM). TechSpot also has a download page for the latest drivers, with detailed information on the changes and which games they affect. The latest drivers only support 64-bit Windows 10 and Windows 11.
Nvidia first announced it was planning to soon end Kepler support this past summer. In the latest Steam survey, the 750Ti still ranks in the middle of the list of most popular graphics cards, above all of AMD's recent RDNA2 cards and almost all of Nvidia's own Ampere cards which released late last year. Kepler cards like the GTX 660 and 760 are much further down, with less than one percent share of overall GPU usage.