NVIDIA’s upcoming R470 driver series will be the last to support graphics cards leveraging green team’s nearly decade-old GPU microarchitecture, Kepler. This is according to new data center driver documentation shared by the company, which noted that post-R470 driver releases will only include support for Maxwell GPUs and newer. NVIDIA’s R470 driver series is a long-term driver support branch, however, so users of GeForce GTX 700 Series and other Kepler products can expect bug fixes and other updates for at least a few more years.
This does mean that the NVIDIA 470 series will be a long-term driver support branch where it will be maintained with new kernel support, operating system compatibility, and bug fixes for a period of about three years. So those with Kepler era GPUs still have at least a few more years of driver maintenance releases to go before losing out on the proprietary Linux driver support.