It feels like every driver update we get from Nvidia
prompts a HUGE spike in forum posts and angry tweets, saying
"NVIDIA RUINED MY FPS IN GAME X WITH DRIVER YYY.ZZ
"AND (x3) PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE!"
But is there really any rhyme or reason to these claims?
Or is it just a bunch of crap?
We tested it!
...And we're gonna tell ya!
...After these messages.
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Now before we really get into this,
I wanna clarify that I've been a LONG time skeptic
When it comes to Nvidia and AMD conspiracy theories
They're almost always, half-baked, fanboy purchase decision
Reinforcing rants and frankly, they make my brain hurt.
Seriously, Jake tried a LOT of different search terms,
All the way from "Nvidia driver hurts performance" to
"Nvidia broken halp plsss" and not even one post
Contained concrete evidence of a legitimate decrease in
Performance over time.
I mean, don't get me wrong, there were a lot of posts about
The 375.86 driver's memory clock issue, BUT,
No one has gathered sufficient, or really any evidence
Showing that Nvidia has purposely harmed performance of older cards
To force their users to upgrade through a driver update.
So, I decided to painstakingly assign Jake, the task of testing it ourselves.
First, we needed to pick some games.
We wanted a mix of ones that use only standard features of the DirectX API,
And at least one example that uses Nvidia's proprietary GameWorks.
Then, to ensure we weren't missing out on a particular architecture that got knee capped,
Because it was like "Too good!" compared to the new thing they needed to sell,
We grabbed a flagship from every generation,
From GTX 680, all the way to 1080 Ti.
With games and cards selected, the next challenge was drivers.
We can't test all of them.
So we eventually settled on the drivers one release after the launch of each card that we used,
And, the most recent one available at this time.
So the idea then, was that this would show us a clear progression over time.
Is Nvidia improving, ignoring, or outright harming the performance of older cards
Once the new generation comes out?
So, driver by driver, card by card, Jake ran almost 200 rounds of benchmarks,
Collecting three metric ass tons of data, then he sat down to organise it, into some charts,
...aaaand the results are astonishingly boring.
The most recent release seems to be a turd across the board, so there's that, but,
In general, not only did performance not decrease,
There were small but noticeable increases over time,
In almost every case.
Due to the minuscule nature of these improvements,
It's hard to see where they actually start and end so,
We're not much closer to a clear picture of Nvidia's internal policy
With respect to product software support,
But it does at least tell us that Nvidia has never rolled out a,
"Sandbag edition" driver.
Which DOESN'T mean they've never rolled out a bad driver.
375.86 hurt performance, and SLI issues seem to come and go like,
Shadow, from Final Fantasy VI.
So, what is going on then? Where are people getting these ideas?
WE THINK the perception mostly stands from this:
When a new game launches, older GPU's don't get the full optimisation treatment,
The way that the current ones would.
That means, that you might run into situations,
Where older cards with more raw power might be beat by newer ones with less.
Textbot showcased this in their articles on Project CARS and Battlefield 1 performance,
Which are linked down in the video description,
Where you can see a GTX 970 outperforming a 780 Ti.
And, there's another major factor, the tech.
Not all graphics solutions are the same, the goal with every new generation is to tailor it
For the features of the game engines that are in wide use, or, right on the horizon.
Examples would be Nvidia specific features like, HairWorks, or general rendering techniques
Like HBAO+ ambient occlusion.
Older silicon doesn't handle either of these things as well, because,
They either didn't exist when it was being designed, or Nvidia guessed it wouldn't be widely implemented.
The work of designing a GPU, starts YEARS before you'll be able to buy one.
I mean if you were in the PC scene a few years back,
You might remember this happening with tesselation.
Nvidia cards were, and still seem to be, MUCH faster at rendering tessellated meshes.
To such a degree, that AMD had to add "AMD Optimised Tessellation" to their drivers.
Basically removing a bunch of it.
And when CryTek controversially put an overkill amount of tessellation in Crysis 2,
It completely tanked the ability of similarly performing AMD cards,
compared to their Nvidia counterparts.
So, in this case, your older hardware literally wasn't made for the questionable decisions
Of game devs in newer games.
So in conclusion then, from our testing, Nvidia does NOT appear to be slowing down older cards
To encourage upgrades.
The better performance from newer cards probably has more to do with their engineers,
NOT just sitting down on their ass all day, I mean look at it from their perspective,
if they don't optimise their **** from generation to generation,
Jensen, will yell at them.
What DOES seem like it's happening, is that newer game features
Aren't getting as much optimisation for older cards.
But I also think it's a little unreasonable to get too mad at Nvidia for this.
They support cards as far back as the 8000 series on Windows 10,
and while they might not perform clock for clock the same as they used to,
They simply weren't built for modern rendering technologies.
So if you want bleeding edge performance, you need to be on the bleeding edge in terms of hardware.
Whether or not that's worth bleeding your wallet dry, that one's up to you.
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So thanks for watching guys, let us know if there are any other brands or,
Conspiracy theories like this that you'd like us to investigate.
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384.76, wait...
They make my brain hurt.
Outro song: Approaching Nirvana - Sugar High
There were small, but no-
*Inaudible*
I was...hate that after these messages, **** these messages.
And now I am these messages, damn. *LOL*