Nvidia updated a knowledge base article that revealed it would no longer support Kepler-series notebook GPUs with its Game Ready Drivers. Another knowledge base article confirmed that support for 3D Vision, the graphics tech it made for 3D glasses and displays, will be nixed as well.
Nvidia said in the first knowledge base article that it would no longer release Game Ready Drivers with performance improvements, bug fixes, and new features for Kepler notebook GPUs starting in April. Releases featuring critical security updates will end in April 2020, which will effectively signal the company's abandonment of those products to focus on newer hardware. That would make sense--Kepler products debuted back in 2012.
The company said that "Game Ready Driver upgrades would continue to be available for desktop Kepler, Maxwell, Pascal, Volta, and Turing-series GPUs." (One would hope--the Turing architecture just debuted a few months ago.) That means this is the first time Nvidia has separated the sunset of an architecture's notebook and desktop hardware; the company hasn't announced when Kepler-series desktop GPUs will stop being supported.
As far as 3D Vision goes, there isn't much to parse. Nvidia said in the second knowledge base article: "Following the posting of the final driver from Release 418 in April 2019, GeForce Game Ready Drivers will no longer support NVIDIA 3D Vision. The NVIDIA support team will continue to address critical driver issues for 3D Vision in Release 418 through April 2020. Those looking to utilize 3D Vision can remain on a Release 418 driver."
Nvidia also noted that 3DTV, which as its name implies enables 3D gaming on 3D television sets, is now built directly into its drivers instead of offered as a standalone download. The company will offer its 3D Vision Video Player (we probably don't need to explain what that one does) as a free download until "the end of 2019" before it too is done away with. This seems like a tacit admission that 3D displays simply didn't catch on.
