Nvidia is preparing to end driver support for Kepler GPUs

[mattferg]

I got a 290 for ~$200 after the last cryptobubble crashed...no card before or since was a better value.

My 1070 for $150 at the same time disagrees

 

[Nobina]

Can't believe these cards are so old. They still "feel" pretty current to me. Even the 900 series...

 

[Maxiking]

Kepler was crap, and the truth of the matter is nVidia stopped really supporting it years ago, anybody who bought a 780 or 780Ti must be regretting not buying a decent R9 290X at the time

yeah, it was so "BAD" and power-efficient, that Nvidia simply boosted clocks of a 660 gtx and released it as a 680gtx and the original full high-end chip was never released because AMD was so slow back then.

Nice cognitive dissonance.

 

[scavengerspc]

yeah, it was so "BAD" and power-efficient, that Nvidia simply boosted clocks of a 660 gtx and released it as a 680gtx and the original full high-end chip was never released because AMD was so slow back then.

Nice cognitive dissonance.

They boosted the clocks AND added 576 cores (A 60% increase) AND bumped a 192 bit bus to 256.

Sheesh, talk about cognitive dissonance. Or willful ignorance.

 

[McMurdeR]

That's a blow considering the shortage of replacements. I sold a 780 recently, it was still a reasonably capable card.

 

[evolucion8]

They stopped optimizing even for Maxwell and Pascal some time ago, compare the performance of those cards at launch and how they behave now compared to their AMD counterparts, Kepler aged terribly.

 

[Maxiking]

They boosted the clocks AND added 576 cores (A 60% increase) AND bumped a 192 bit bus to 256.

Sheesh, talk about cognitive dissonance. Or willful ignorance.

GK104 was a medium-sized chip and the moniker for the mid-end segment. >> x60 class of Nvidia gpus

But the performance was so good and Amd/ATI was so slow back then, that the full chip was being marketed and sold as a 680GTX instead of a 660GTX.

GK110, aka the traditional highend chip /x80 and x70 gpus/ was not realised. It wasn't needed, selling the mid-end chip with the highend margins was more than enough for Nvidia.

 

[scavengerspc]

GK104 was a medium-sized chip and the moniker for the mid-end segment. >> x60 class of Nvidia gpus

But the performance was so good and Amd/ATI was so slow back then, that the full chip was being marketed and sold as a 680GTX instead of a 660GTX.

GK110, aka the traditional highend chip /x80 and x70 gpus/ was not realised. It wasn't needed, selling the mid-end chip with the highend margins was more than enough for Nvidia.

Now I see what you meant. Though certainly more than just boosting the clocks.
One thing though, the competition was the 7970 which I think was quite good vs the 680.

 

[Watzupken]

At some point, Nvidia will have to drop support for older GPUs, but I feel this is not the right time since there is a shortage of GPUs now. Having said that, I have doubts that Nvidia really put in any effort to optimize driver for older GPUs. So there is very little reason to upgrade driver all the time, especially for GPUs that are a few generations backwards.

 

[LNCPapa]

I remember replacing my Quadfire 5970s with a pair of ASUS Strix 680s on release day and running them SLI. No upgrade made me feel happier about the process. Those cards eventually ended up in my youngest child's computer. Kepler had a great run.

 

[hel0sn8]

Although I didn't own a 290X at the time ( I have one now as a spare card ) I did own a 280X and then a 390X and I can assure you I am not salty, the drivers were fine and anyone who keeps their cards for longer the GCN was just a better architecture especially for anything Vulcan/DX12 and AMD didn't skimp on the ram like nVidia did then and still doing now!!

btw I have a RTX3080 atm so please keep your AMD fanboy comments to yourself

LOL only cos AMD 6000 series are cackamonger. FANBOIIII

 

[hel0sn8]

Can't believe these cards are so old. They still "feel" pretty current to me. Even the 900 series...

Even the 900 series is years newer? Therefore would feel more current. Plus support hasn't yet ended for them. Yer - we know.

 

[Squid Surprise]

Even the 900 series is years newer? Therefore would feel more current. Plus support hasn't yet ended for them. Yer - we know.

1 year newer than latest Kepler....there was no 800 series - except for laptops...

 

[hwertz]

So, are the AMD cards from that era scheduled to get updates for even longer than the Nvidia cards? The main reason I have been grudgingly loyal to the green team is the perception that they have better driver support. I think there was a Techspot article some time ago supporting that belief.

This is an important issue. Maybe its time for a new article comparing both time and quality of driver/firmware/bios/etc updates of graphic cards, motherboards, phones. Maybe a user poll?

In Linux, yes, AMD quit using binary drivers a while back and got all their support ported into the open-source ones, so their hardware is supported indefinitely all the way back (Intel GPUs are like that too, with the amusing result of some cards supporting DX11 and 12 in Wine on Linux but only DX10 in real Windows, simply because Intel's x years of driver support ran out just before DX11 so they never shipped DX11 drivers for them.).

I'm running a GTX 650 right now, so here's hoping within next 3 years either a) I get newer hardware (not necessarily the case, the only thing my current hardware has kept me running is rpcs3 running PS3 games a bit too slowly, that's CPU limited anyway not GPU.. they recommend an octa-core for that!) or b) nouveau open-source nvidia suport gets to be feature-complete on it, at which case the card will be supported indefinitely by that (... I haven't actually checked, it's entirely possible it basically feature-complete on Kepler already; I do like the nvidia driver.)