Nvidia may be getting ready to discontinue driver support for most of its GeForce GTX 600 and 700 series graphics cards based on its legacy Kepler GPU architecture. If so, the timing would not be ideal, given the near impossibility of purchasing graphics cards at near MSRP right now.

End of support is not a foregone conclusion. However, TechPowerUp over the weekend found an interesting note in a Data Center document outlining Nvidia's roadmap for driver support. At that point, it indicated that Kelper would be obsoleted by Nvidia's R470 driver stack (now R460).

This document relates to Nvidia's datacenter products, but if driver support is ending, then presumably consumer products as well.

But here's where it gets really puzzling. This document was last updated last April, but there have been at least some recent changes. Looking at the document now, it no longer indicates the end of Kepler support by the R470 driver stack, instead it states that support is "ongoing." However, a look at the Wayback Machine showed that R470 was listed as no longer supported this past Saturday.

Given the current GPU situation, it is possible that Nvidia has changed its mind. Or, since it must have been over a year since the document was updated (which is obviously not true), Nvidia may have changed their policy some time ago and just forgot to correct it until now.

We'll find out soon enough. As of the latest driver release (466.47 WHQL), Kepler is still supported and owners of graphics cards like the GeForce GTX 780 Ti will get the same (supported) new features and performance tweaks as owners of newer GPUs as well as owners of newer GPUs.

Don't be surprised if Nvidia ends support soon, whether on the R470 stack or not too long after; Kepler has been around for almost a decade at this point and was replaced by Maxwell starting with later revision GTX 700 models . It is also worth noting that Nvidia has dropped support for Fermi GPUs (GeForce GTX 400 and 500 series) in its R390 drivers.