Come April 2019, NVIDIA will be winding down driver support and development for its mobile Kepler GPU architecture. The ageing GPU architecture first came on to the scene in 2012 and was used to power the GPU brand’s GeForce GTX 600 series graphics cards. As well as its 600M series and some 900M series mobile GPUs.
According to a post on its official support page, NVIDIA says that it will continue to deliver Game Ready driver updates, performance enhancements, and bug fixes to mobile Maxwell, Pascal, and Turing notebook GPUs. In the case of Kepler, the GPU architecture will only be getting critical security updates, but only until April 2020.
Do note that this planned demarcation is only applicable to the mobile version of the Kepler GPU, and not the desktop variant. The move to stagger an architecture’s retirement is, for lack of a better word, odd even by NVIDIA’s standard. For context, the GPU maker would typically cease any and all driver development and support for legacy architectures. With immediate effect.
On the subject of legacy status, NVIDIA will also be moving its 3D Vision products into legacy status starting next month. Just like mobile Kepler, the products will also receive critical update support, but only until April 2020. If you wish to continue using the feature, you’ll need to remain on a Release 418 driver.
