News Nvidia Ends Support For Kepler GPUs, Windows 7, Windows 8/8.1 On August 31

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This news couldn't have come at a worse time, with the cost of upgrading to a newer generation being as high as it is. It's only going to add to the demand for whatever cards are currently available and drive prices even higher. Also bad is that Maxwell is now on the bubble, so it makes no sense to upgrade from a Kepler to a Maxwell, if it is going to be next to be dropped from support, and who knows how many more driver releases it is going to have. It could have 2 or 3 more years of driver updates, or 2 or 3 more months. It would suck to spend big money for a 980Ti now, only to lose driver support a few months later.
 
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Joseph_138 said:
This news couldn't have come at a worse time, with the cost of upgrading to a newer generation being as high as it is. It's only going to add to the demand for whatever cards are currently available and drive prices even higher. Also bad is that Maxwell is now on the bubble, so it makes no sense to upgrade from a Kepler to a Maxwell, if it is going to be next to be dropped from support, and who knows how many more driver releases it is going to have. It could have 2 or 3 more years of driver updates, or 2 or 3 more months. It would suck to spend big money for a 980Ti now, only to lose driver support a few months later.
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There is no point in buying such old cards ... IMO if you want to use such cards get a PS5 or XBOX and game on them until the GPU cards prices come down.
 
Joseph_138 said:
This news couldn't have come at a worse time, with the cost of upgrading to a newer generation being as high as it is. It's only going to add to the demand for whatever cards are currently available and drive prices even higher. Also bad is that Maxwell is now on the bubble, so it makes no sense to upgrade from a Kepler to a Maxwell, if it is going to be next to be dropped from support, and who knows how many more driver releases it is going to have. It could have 2 or 3 more years of driver updates, or 2 or 3 more months. It would suck to spend big money for a 980Ti now, only to lose driver support a few months later.
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The Kepler architecture is 9 years old. That's an eternity in this industry. At some point, it is time to move on, and Kepler is past that point. Due to RAM limitations alone, the only card still potentially usable for current generation AAA games at only 1080p is the original Titan. Maxwell is on the clock now, and even though it is 3 years newer, that still makes it 6 years old. If you're paying a "fortune" to buy a Maxwell card today, that's on you., and just a bad use of money.
 
littlechipsbigchips said:
There is no point in buying such old cards ... IMO if you want to use such cards get a PS5 or XBOX and game on them until the GPU cards prices come down.
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There is if you're using something even older. Check out the hardware forums. There are still a lot of people using cards from this generation, and some older than that. Someone using a GeForce 400 or 500 card would consider a 600 or 700 card an upgrade. Not everyone can afford the newest hardware as soon as it comes out.
 
I'll continue using Windows 7 with older drivers anyhow. I was already doing that, and I do it with Windoze OS X as well. The newest driver is seldom the best driver. Newer drivers are often inferior. And, sometimes quite often "features" are merely gimmicks to excite the kiddos.
 
A whole boatload of people are still running older platforms like sandy/ivy bridge with kepler or pre-kepler cards.
Hell, my back up cards are a pair of gtx 760s that were only pulled out of this current rig last October.
 
hotaru.hino said:
It's not like after the date you can no longer play games.

You just won't get performance improvements for games that the GPU can't even run very well. At least not without turning it down to 1080p Medium or lower
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It will eventually mean just that for some games.

Not that it is such a bad thing. Most of the cards are 8 years old and are long past the expected lifetime of the caps.
Kepler is a one thing at a time arch. Try to throw async compute, or any concurrent compute at it and it's performance suffers.
Ampere can totally handle async and can do RT and tensor loads as well.
A lot of this may be a message to devs to finally give up on restricting their games to accommodate for an arch that holds them back feature wise.

My 780ti is still a competent 1080p card with old fashioned rasterized games including CP2077 and walks all over the 1050ti in my laptop. It holds up to the Techpowerup 1080p rating on the specs page just fine in games like that. But new games shouldn't be restricted to having compatibility with a relative relic.
My 580 still plays a lot of new games slowly, but some are incompatible, like SOTTR where not all of the triangles fill every frame and flicker black. Many new ones just don't start. Some of this may also be the 1.5GB vram. Either way games have gotten better moving on from Fermi and they will continue getting better moving on from Kepler.
 
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USAFRet said:
People do things other than "game" with a PC.
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I am talking about Gaming here , not other things . sure you can use integrated graphics if you want a PC. but when you want to game you buy a gaming GPU which is impossible today uless you pay double the price. more over , Quadros and fire pros prices did not go up , so thats also another option for non gamers.
 
I honestly don't know how many people are still holding on to these cards, but pulling driver support when there is no GPU readily available for sale is an inconsiderate decision. They could have extended the lifespan until things settle down before making a decision to pull support for older graphic card.
 
littlechipsbigchips said:
I am talking about Gaming here , not other things . sure you can use integrated graphics if you want a PC. but when you want to game you buy a gaming GPU which is impossible today uless you pay double the price. more over , Quadros and fire pros prices did not go up , so thats also another option for non gamers.
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I've used quite some firepros and they all have like gtx 500-600 levels of performance. I doubt you'd upgrade from Kepler to that
 
watzupken said:
I honestly don't know how many people are still holding on to these cards, but pulling driver support when there is no GPU readily available for sale is an inconsiderate decision. They could have extended the lifespan until things settle down before making a decision to pull support for older graphic card.
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The market is terrible for those in the DIY market, but I would argue a large majority of people who have gaming PCs:
  • Bought it pre-built
  • Typically run the system to the ground or until it starts feeling too slow for them before buying another
Look around in Tom's recent news and you'll find that graphics card shipments over the last year was at or near 100 million. And you can find data that suggests the number of "gaming PCs" was close to that.

Just because you can't find a card on store shelves doesn't mean there's a shortage. Otherwise I'd expect companies like CyberPowerPC to be out of business.
 
See no reason to support old windows versions ... Consider that new windows 10 is pretty cheap ... and run well even on old pc with 4gb ram .... (Parents still use couple of a first gen i3 with 4gb ram and gt710 as internet machines with windows 10, only upgrade sata ssd on 256 GB ... As far I remember even windows 7 was slow on HDD ... )
 
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