I’ll be the first to admit that like many press, I have a tendency to look ahead to future products rather than dwell in the past. It’s unavoidable since the latest and greatest is what drives traffic. However, my reality doesn’t reflect what the vast majority of buyers actually experience, particularly when it comes to expensive core components like graphics cards and processors. Financial constraints typically dictate that an investment in hardware –be it leading edge or more affordable- should last a good amount of time. How long would that be? The longevity of a particular piece of hardware will vary from person to person but buyers do expect support for their purchases past the respective End of Life dates. This leads us to the reasoning behind this article.While the GTX 780 Ti was considered a class-leading card and the very pinnacle of NVIDIA’s Kepler architecture when it was launched in November of 2013 (yes it’s been nearly two years) it has since been replaced with Maxwell-based cards like the GTX 980 and GTX 980 Ti. Meanwhile, the 700-series has faded into that dreaded EOL status, though there were assurances that driver support would continue.After the GeForce product stack transitioned to Maxwell, several discussion threads popped up everywhere from NVIDIA’s own forums to Reddit claiming that driver optimizations for Kepler in newer games have become nearly nonexistent. This supposedly caused performance issues with nearly-new and very expensive GPUs in some key games. Imagine buying a GTX 780 Ti in July 2014 only to have its drivers hobbled from September 2014 (the GTX 980’s launch date) onwards. Two words for that: no thanks.On the flip side of this equation, many have claimed that AMD has effectively supported their Hawaii-based cards far better than NVIDIA has with their own older architectures. The end result is supposedly more consistent performance in newer titles, so much so that some benchmarks I’ve seen put the R9 290X -a card that the GTX 780 Ti once handily beat- well ahead of its erstwhile competitor. Writing this introduction before the tests are actually conducted has me thinking that this may indeed be possible since the Hawaii-based cores live on in two of AMD’s many rebranded cards: the R9 390X and R9 390. Hence, AMD has to absolutely support them.If there’s one bit of information you need before skipping the rest of this introduction and moving to the benchmarks, it is the chart above. This is the way the market stood once the GTX 780 Ti was launched and again after the GTX 980 was released. In short, NVIDIA’s flagship Kepler card remained just behind Maxwell’s GM204 in September of 2014 and managed to convincingly beat AMD’s R9 290X back when it was first introduced.If NVIDIA has been lax in their duties of optimizing for Kepler, the percentage differences detailed above should dramatically swing into the favor of AMD and the GTX 980 while the GTX 780 Ti could potentially be left in the dust. The same goes for AMD and the R9 290X. It won’t be a subtle shift either since driver-based performance enhancements can make a world of difference to framerates.In order to test whether or not these cards’ performance has stood the test of time, I decided to put them through our usual list of an even dozen games at 1440P (none of the cards here is exactly acceptable for high setting 4K duties). Of those games, only four were around when the GTX 780 Ti was first available while one of those -Battlefield 4- received the lion’s share of its key updates after our launch-day review.As for the newer games, Dying Light, Dragon Age, Far Cry 4, Shadow of Mordor, GTA V, Assassin’s Creed Unity, Total War: Attila and the Witcher have varying release dates, some of which are quite recent. Among these, I have seen forum reports of GTA V, Total War, The Witcher, Far Cry 4 and Shadow of Mordor all featuring some kind of performance hiccup for one architecture or another. Many of these are cited whenever the subject of the GTX 700-series’ falling performance metrics are brought up.For comparison purposes I’ve added a GTX 980 for good measure and our standard benchmark runs and test setup are being used. One important note is that our R9 290X is custom cooled but stock clocked so it will have no problem avoiding the throttling that plagued reference designs. Drivers being used are NVIDA's 355.69 and AMD's 15.7.1.While this quick article isn’t meant to be a definitive overview of possible issues with 700-series cards since the GTX 980 was launched, it should give you a snapshot of how the GTX 780 Ti and R9 290X perform now, nearly two years after their initial launches. Has driver support been allowed to lapse or has NVIDIA and AMD kept up with the times in an effort to keep performance of their previous generation GPUs in line with expectations?