I post this because there are a few people on this forum who are still on the Fermi cards. In addition, those here still on Kepler should be on watch as they are the next generation up.
In short, no more features and bugfixes, no support for new API’s, even the critical security updates will vanish next year. Anyone still on the 580 for instance will have to upgrade (which I would argue could be a little bit of a bum deal right now with the prices).
This also means the death of 32 bit for Nvidia owners (regardless of the generation owned). This though can be seen as a good thing, as it will allow the Blender developers to remove all 32bit specific code and drop the maintenance needed to allow such builds to compile. Still, that generation was well known for its performance and prowess as rendering machines (noting the early Cycles demos).
The lack of driver updates on older hardware is a bit of a bummer, but hardly a deal-breaker. While newer drivers may technically support older hardware, it is extremely unlikely that those driver updates have a meaningful impact on performance on older hardware.
I doubt that there has been a driver update in the past 3 years that has impacted the performance of gtx500 level hardware.
Just keep using the most recent drivers you can, they will continue to work for a long long time.
Just to clarify, they just announced they won’t be updating ‘the geforce experience’ for 32 bit anymore, the announcement that they stopped adding new features to the 32 bit drivers was back in dec’2017 but it flew largely under the radar until this week for some reason.
We still have machines working with gtx580s. those cards were beasts for the time. It has unmatched compute performance for generations to come. only recently have we upgraded to the 10xx series.