 This was once a $700 GPU, but Nvidia now says, you know what, it's worthless, it's garbage. But as they say, one man's trash is another man's treasure. And with Nvidia dropping support for the 700 series and older GPUs, are they now effectively e-waste? Or could this be an opportunity to score a deal as people rush to dump their old graphics cards? I mean, surely this thing can still game, right? The answer may surprise you, though not as much as my segue to our sponsor will surprise you. Ridge Wallet has redefined the traditional wallet with its compact frame and RFID blocking plates. Keep your wallet bulged down and use offer code Linus to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, as of August this year, Nvidia will not be providing any more game ready drivers for their Kepler architecture based cards. So that's most of their 600 series and 700 series cards, all the way from the GT 630 up to the Titan Black. So that doesn't mean that these cards suddenly can't run video games though. Why don't we take a look at kind of a middle of the road Kepler card like this GTX 760 WinForce. You can snag a card like this for as low as around $70 on eBay. And if you guys are thinking, I mean, who would still be running one of those? No one uses those anymore. Well, then you're being a bit of an elitist douche because Steam's hardware survey shows that the 760 is still being used by 0.25% of users. That doesn't really sound like a lot until you consider that that only puts it a few slots lower than the RTX 3090. Also consider that Steam had 120 million active users as of last year. So even if only half of them agreed to the hardware survey, that's still 150,000 Steam users who are running GTX 760s. So one of the most compelling use cases for a budget GPU like this is to take your existing prebuilt throw a few bucks at a graphics card and boom, turn it into a gaming rig. The only thing you're gonna have to consider is that this one uses an eight pin and a six pin power connector. So that's a little more than the reference cards dual six pins and it'll need about 170 Watts of power, which means you might need a power supply upgrade if you were to install one of these in a prebuilt because they typically have very tight power budgets, not to mention tight cases. So make sure you've got enough space for this long ass shroud. So there's some challenges to overcome, but you gotta ask yourself, what are your other options? If you're looking to save a buck, you can get a last generation console like an Xbox one or a PlayStation four, but those are still selling in the 200 to $250 range. So assuming you have some kind of computer already, this could be a fantastic option. If you just want to game. Yeah, CSGO might be a nine year old game, but as of today, it is still the top played game on Steam. So it's hardly irrelevant and you can see, yeah, we're running at 1080P, but we've got this game maxed out in excess of a hundred frames per second. And that's with our 5600X CPU handling all these bot simulations. This is not a real match. So we're just gonna turn everything down. There we go. Now we're getting 250, 350 frames per second. Look at that. You can watch me die at 200 FPS. We've got everything cranked to low now and it's flipping fly in here. Oh wow, it doesn't mean I can aim. Please die. How are you still alive? Whatever. There. What really? Again, again, again. Did you just fail? Of course, one game doesn't prove anything. So here's rocket league running at 1080P. I mean, we're running at 200 FPS here, dog. They're not gonna get nothing because they don't have a hundred and, oh shoot, I forgot to shift. Wow, that was really awkward. Okay then, e-sports games maxed out, absolutely no problem. But that's not exactly a surprise. Both of these games are from around the same era as the 700 series graphics cards. Not to mention that e-sports titles are generally tuned to run on the widest range of computers possible. So 180 FPS, absolutely maxed out in this game. Yeah, but yeah. This all medium presets running at right around 50 FPS on the fairly busy Monaco map. I mean, it's not like F1 2020 is the most challenging AAA game, but I mean, hey, it's a modern game and it's running fine, just fine. At least until I break it. There you go. Unfortunately, the same is not necessarily true in every game. Turning Apex Legends up to high with anti-aliasing enabled at 1080p, we are looking at about 35 FPS. And this is on the training map, not an actual larger map with other characters running around causing problems for your FPSs. Which isn't to say we can't get the game running reasonably smoothly. We are now at 50, 55 FPS. The difference is that unlike F1 2020, we had to absolutely dump all of our settings. So you're gonna see weird stuff like this mountain appearing to be made out of clay. And the thing about a competitive game like this is that having a better graphics card is about more than just smoother animations. If you've got objects and textures just popping in, the way your caveman eyeballs work is you're naturally watching out for motion in your peripheral vision. So you're gonna be walking around on the map and you're gonna have things going like, whoa, whoa, whoa, holy smokes, that had me over there. And then it's not, it's just a rock. Take that rocks, I got no ammo. We managed to hit anywhere from 70 to 90 FPS by dropping down to 1600 by 900. But by this point, this is looking like a game from like 10 years ago. Moving into an even more demanding AAA game, Doom Eternal was a bit of a weird one. When we booted it up, it actually defaulted to Ultra Nightmare, even though you can see that clearly that vastly exceeds the mere two gigabytes of VRAM that are available on our GTX 760. And in fact, if we dump it all the way down to low, we are still 900 megabytes over our budget, which leads us to kind of an interesting point. So we'll talk about what we wait for the game to load. These cards started coming out around 2013, and that was long before 4K gaming was a real consideration. And long before games needed more than two or three gigs of VRAM. That's right, even the top end consumer card, the 780 Ti only ever shipped with three gigs of video memory. You had to step up to a Titan to get six. So it's probably enough for the kinds of titles that you would play on these cards, but it's clearly going to become more and more of an issue in modern games that have far more aggressive VRAM requirements. So we're getting 25, 24. Ooh, as we come around this corner, you can see we're dropping all the way down to mid 20s frames per second. Yeah, in a fast paced shooter like this, this is not a great experience. 19 FPS I saw it drop down to. I'm not, it's not even registering my clicks sometimes. And remember, this is like the first level. So there's no way that you're playing at a high difficulty in the later levels like this. This is not a very good experience. So, okay, you're not playing Doom Eternal, but still a lot of game left in this thing. And the 760 is not even the highest end card that Nvidia has dropped game ready driver support for. Now let's chuck on a 780 Ti and see how that goes. Now you might think, it's a lot to spend on a whole GPU that's not getting any new drivers, but with a little bit of patience, a 780 Ti can be had for as little as around 150 to 160 US dollars. And it's a lot faster. Like in some situations, it can be as much as 60% faster than the 760 that we just looked at. Obviously, if CSGO and Rocket League run great on the little brother, the 780 Ti is not gonna struggle with them. So let's start with F1 2020, where confusingly, we're running at just about exactly the same frame rate. High 40s, low 50s. Ah, except for one small detail. F1 2020 automatically detected that we were running a better card and cranked everything to ultra. That's right, my friends, anti-aliasing is on, super ultra high details are on, so all the shadows are looking as good as they can look. And it doesn't look that different, but there's definitely fewer jaggies. So that's an absolute benefit. Let's throw it at medium. There we go, not freaking bad. Running at the same detail settings as before, we are now at 90 FPS. And yeah, that is markedly smoother. As for Doom Eternal, it's a lot better than it was. I mean, this is, it can run the game. You know, there's your 80, 90 FPS, but as soon as, even though technically we squeeze in under the VRAM requirements for all low, you can tell it's struggling. Yeah, it's the rapid swings between, you know, honestly good frame rates, we're at like 80, 90 FPS, and just tank like close to 20 FPS. It plays well enough that I kind of forgot I was evaluating graphics cards and just started playing the game. So that's it, that's the threshold. It's playable. Since we've had some more success, why don't we kick things up a notch here and try Dirt 5? And cannot find a compatible graphics card. The reason for this is that the 700 series, while they have support for DirectX 12, they do not fully support the entire DirectX 12 feature set, which unfortunately is the minimum graphics API available in Dirt 5. So if you look at the Dirt 5 minimum specs, they actually call for a GTX 970 or better. And that's a real consideration for something like this, because as DirectX 12 becomes more ubiquitous, certain games like Dirt 5 may simply stop supporting lower versions. Now, e-sports games, as I mentioned before, are designed to run on the widest variety of hardware possible. So it's likely they'll support these older APIs for quite a while longer. So if CS GO or Valorant is your jam, these older cards could be pretty appealing. Let's try something else, like Civ 6. That's not bad for medium details 2X anti-aliasing. I mean, depending on how busy the scene is, we're anywhere from 100 to like 60, 70 FPS. That's very respectable. I mean, we could probably turn this up. It's not like this is a fast-paced game or anything. No offense, Civ enthusiasts, I'm sure you're like going all the actions per minute. Let's turn it to high though. Okay, that dropped us down to like 45 FPS when things get busy. But in a game like this, that is absolutely playable. Absolutely. And the shadow details are way better. Even though Control calls for a GTX 780 as its minimum graphics card, we are running it like, well, 60 FPS at pretty decent details on a 780 Ti. Okay, that makes sense. I mean, the developer did say it'll run on this. So yeah, they can still game, which means what then? We should be outraged Nvidia's dropping game-ready driver support for these? Well, not quite. We gotta remember, Nvidia has supported cards like the 700 series for the better part of eight years, which in a world where Android phone manufacturers will drop support in as little as two years, makes Nvidia look like absolute rock stars. I mean, yeah, a graphics driver is likely less complicated than an entire operating system, but I still say they're doing pretty darn good. And there are some real-world actual reasons for them to drop support for these cards. We already saw a couple of them in the form of the VRAM limitations. I mean, that's just the hardware on the card. They just can't keep up. And API limitations where modern games are simply not going to be able to run on them. Also, there's some reasons that it might not be practical to continue to run these cards. The 780 Ti, for example, draws about 250 watts, which doesn't sound like a ton compared to something like an RTX 3090 at 350 watts. But you should also consider that a much newer GTX 1060, which is roughly performance comparable, and actually even faster in some cases, draws less than half that amount of power. Now, at the moment, GTX 1060 6G cards may be a bit price inflated due to crypto mining, but you can get a 3G card for around 180 to 200 US dollars. That is 20 to $50 more than a 780 Ti, but when you consider the power savings, it could actually be cheaper in the long run. For example, let's say you play for two hours a day, five days a week, and you pay on average 22 cents per kilowatt hour because you live in, let's say Los Angeles. Over the span of a year, a 1060 would save you around $14 in power, and that could be even more if you game more often or if you pay more for your power. $14 doesn't sound like a lot, but give it three years, and you have basically paid the difference, and the entire time you've had game-ready drivers along with a host of other benefits. 10 series cards have HDMI 2.0, which means they can do 4K 60 over HDMI. They've got DisplayPort 1.4, which can handle up to 4K 144 Hertz. They've got support for FreeSync, which the 700 series does support G-Sync, but does not support FreeSync, not to mention that while the 700 series also has NVENC, the 10 series has more feature-rich NVENC encoder with support for H.265, better color and higher resolution. So if you're just using your graphics card to encode a live stream, it probably won't make a difference, but if you're into editing your videos after the fact or creating HDR or high resolution content, that might matter to you. With all of that in mind though, the actual driver cutoff hasn't happened yet. So if you're looking for a deal on a GPU today, these Kepler cards aren't a terrible idea if that price premium for a used 10 series just isn't in your budget. But keep in mind that the prices will likely continue to drop once Nvidia actually cuts off support in August of this year. So in particular, if you were looking for a secondary rig to land with your friends when they come over, yeah, a sunset in Kepler card could look like a pretty good deal. And as for the folks out there who are already running a Kepler-based GPU, if you can't afford to step up to something like a 1060, does the lack of game ready drivers mean that you're just SOL? Well, not necessarily. I mean, we just showed you guys, these cards can totally still game and Nvidia will still be providing security updates as needed for the time being. So it doesn't suddenly turn your GPU into a brick because you don't get a game ready driver. In fact, a lot of the time, older GPUs that Nvidia has already deprecated can still play a fair number of lightweight modern games as long as you turn the settings down. And in fact, we're gonna be testing out exactly what that's like in a future video. So make sure you get subscribed. Just like you might wanna subscribe to our sponsor for today's video, Morning Brew. Morning Brew is a free daily newsletter that's delivered right to you every day of the week. They aggregate everything that's happening in business, finance, and tech, and present it to you in a super easy to consume format. With Morning Brew, you don't need to go out looking for the news, you just wait for the notification, open the newsletter up and read to your heart's content. It might sound overly simple, but that's because it is. So give it a try for yourself, get subscribed for free, and in less than 15 seconds, you'll be ready to go at the link below. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out, hey, why don't you check out Nvidia GPUs through the ages? We looked at how much their performance has improved over time. It was a while back, but maybe we need to do a new one. We could do a new one.