NVIDIA Legacy Driver 470.256.02
The final driver branch supporting Kepler GPUs, GeForce 600 and 700 series cards that the current NVIDIA driver dropped. Security fixes only, with no new feature development.
Download RUN Project website ↗Download Mirrors
The 470 branch is the last driver supporting Kepler-generation GPUs: the GeForce 600 and 700 series, and the Quadro and Tesla cards of that era.
If you have one of those cards, the current driver will not work with it. This is the branch you need.
Check whether it applies to you
lspci -nn | grep -i vgaNVIDIA maintains a list of which GPUs fall into which legacy branch. Installing the wrong branch produces a card that is detected and does not initialise.
What legacy support means
Security fixes only. No new features, no new Vulkan extensions, and increasingly limited support for new kernels and new X or Wayland versions.
That last point is the practical constraint. A legacy driver frozen in 2025 has to build against kernels released after it, and eventually it does not. Distributions carry patches for a while and then stop.
The realistic options
Use 470 if the card works well enough for what you do and you can accept an ageing driver.
Use nouveau, the in-kernel open driver, which handles Kepler reasonably. It cannot clock the card properly so performance is a fraction of the proprietary driver, and for a desktop, video playback, and light use it is often adequate. It also never breaks on a kernel update, which is worth something.
Replace the card. Kepler is over a decade old, and a modern low-end GPU or even integrated graphics will outperform it while being fully supported.
Installation caveats
Prefer your distribution’s legacy driver package over NVIDIA’s .run installer. The .run file installs outside package management, does not rebuild on kernel updates, and conflicts with packaged versions in ways that are tedious to unpick.
sudo apt install nvidia-driver-470 # Debian and UbuntuThe DKMS caveat applies with more force here, because a legacy branch is likelier to fail against a new kernel. Check dkms status before rebooting after any kernel update, as our NVIDIA guide describes.
Wayland
Legacy branches lack the interfaces modern Wayland compositors expect. On Kepler hardware, an X11 session is often the working configuration, which is one of the few remaining cases where that advice is still correct.
Verify Your Download
SHA-256 checksums are published on the NVIDIA driver pages.