When the performance of something significantly degrades over time.
The names comes from the Nvidia
Kepler GPU architecture (GeForce GTX 600&700 series), which was infamous for suffering severe and steadily bigger performance losses in games after its release.
This was caused by poor optimisation in Nvidia’s drivers after the release of
the Maxwell architecture (GeForce GTX 900 series), as without
shader optimisation the raw performance of Kepler cards fell off a cliff.