NVIDIA gave Bo3b and I advance notice of this back in January, and we've been talking about what it will mean amongst ourselves.

In the short term, it doesn't mean much of anything - the existing drivers and future 418 series updates will continue supporting 3D Vision, and nothing really changes for a while. And even once NVIDIA's official support ends next year there is no reason we can't keep using the drivers well after that - we are already no strangers to using old drivers for 3D Vision and that strategy will keep working just as well as it has in the past. That said, if you do find bugs in the 418 series you should report them so that they can be fixed in the remaining year of support we have from NVIDIA.

There may be things that happen that try to force us off the 418 drivers - the most likely being a new game or hardware that might want newer drivers. Newer games are not usually such a big deal - they might sometimes depend on a driver profile, but driver profiles can be backported fairly easily so unless they depend on a bug fix or actual new functionality in the driver we should be able to keep using the 418 for these as well. Hardware support may be a different matter - plenty of cards have minimum driver versions they depend on, so buying a card released after April might be asking for trouble, and you should factor this into any plans you might have to upgrade your graphics card in the near future.

Going forward, Bo3b and I have been talking about the possibility of writing a replacement for the 3D Vision driver. As it turns out, we already have quite a lot of pieces in place that we need to do this, but there is still plenty of work left do to.