nVidia drivers

Tyres O'Flaherty

Tyres O'Flaherty
Just as a matter of interest, what version of nVidia drivers are you using if you have the relevant card?

I can see the latest are 441.12 and I'm toying with upgrading - which always makes me jittery - and I've never updated the drivers; consequently, mine are really old. But if it ain't broke etc.

My PC is, basically, an i7 5820K o/c to 4.4ghz, a GTX980ti and 16gb RAM.

EDITED - better English and a clarifiction on CPU
 
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STRONTIUM DOG

STRONTIUM DOG
I would not worry about updating gpu drivers to much its pratically a clik and forget operation and if things are not better you can easily reload the old driver installation package or just delete the new entry from default c:NVIDIA folder
if i open that folder now for eg I see another folder called display driver and if I open that I see folders from 342.01 to 430.86 if I deleted my current which is 430.86 then 385.41 would load by default.
if I deleted the entire folder windows would use a generic driver until a new driver package was installed which may be a little disconcerting as the screen resolution would not be optimum but still nothing to worry about once the new package had replaced the c:nvidia folder I deleted with just the latest driver and no previous driver history
usually the latest drivers are just optimizations made for the very latest releases and in some cases a new game will require the latest driver to be able to play as a rule I don't bother updating unless a new game wont run without the update for eg assassins creed odessey required driver version min 430.86 so I updated from 385.41 almost the same card I am currently using a 980GTX atm
 
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GroG79

G
Always the latest driver. Gives more performance; less bugs, more compatability with new games. If this was not the case then why would vendors release drivers anyways?

Nvidia is not known for keeping older cards updated and the performance increase of newer drivers is usually lower compared to old AMD cards. Nevertheless updating drivers does give free performance.
 

Zieman

Zieman
GroG79 said:
Nevertheless updating drivers does give free performance.
Click to expand...
IF you get lucky and the new version is a stable driver for your card.
I've had some struggle with nVidia drivers & E: D, several BSODs even - all pointing to GFX drivers.
The version I'm using wasn't the newest even back then when I installed it. But it was reported as a stable version, and I needed to upgrade from older stable version because E: D minimum required driver version to work ok was upped past that number.
 

GroG79

G
Well I did not want to say that Nvidia is in supporting old cards.. But there you go.. Nvidia does not like users of old cards...

But also Nvidia changed from 4-5 years ago. Driver support did get better. Reverting a driver is not so hard IF you run into problems.
 

the100thmonkey

the100thmonkey
Some driver updates are specifically intended to boost performance in certain games; others are intended to patch security holes and/or address bugs with specific games or the OS. Others offer generic improvements.

IMO, unless you're running at 4K or high refresh rates, you won't see a noticeable difference in performance on a 980Ti.
 

Morbad

Morbad
I normally keep mine fairly current, mostly just to see if anything has changed or improved, but I do not feel compelled to update unless I'm experiencing specific issues or a new version offers relevant changes.

441.08 introduced two new features that I make use of and 441.12 addressed the latest security bulletin.

441.20 doesn't have any documented changes that would be relevant to anything I do; it was released to add profiles for some games I do not play.

The next version will likely contain another security update, so I'll probably switch to those shortly after they are released.

Best to read the release notes.

GroG79 said:
If this was not the case then why would vendors release drivers anyways?
Click to expand...

Mostly to make sure the parts they are currently trying to sell do as well as possible in contemporary AAA titles.

I normally don't advocate updating drivers without some specific reason...new bugs are not uncommon.

Zieman said:
I've had some struggle with nVidia drivers & E: D, several BSODs even - all pointing to GFX drivers.
Click to expand...

While there are certainly exceptions, most BSOD referencing drivers aren't the fault of the driver.
 

Charles Erika von Hackbeil

Charles Erika von Hackbeil
I have a GTX 1070 with a 7700K, 441.20 (which was the RDR Game-Ready-Driver) also caused major stutters for me - not in Elite (didn't test) but in IRacing, which uses a really old engine that shouldn't stress a proper PC at all.

Had to reinstall the old driver first to make my system work well again. Then, RDR2 launcher told me there is a new, updated driver to tackle RDR2 performance issues, 441.34. Installed it and everything's fine again. I don't know why Nvidia don't offer it as a normal download, you can only get it from their support page. Anyway, here's the link:

NVIDIA Support

nvidia.custhelp.com nvidia.custhelp.com
 

hems303

hems303
Tyres O'Flaherty said:
Just as a matter of interest, what version of nVidia drivers are you using if you have the relevant card?

I can see the latest are 441.12 and I'm toying with upgrading - which always makes me jittery - and I've never updated the drivers; consequently, mine are really old. But if it ain't broke etc.

My PC is, basically, an i7 5820K o/c to 4.4ghz, a GTX980ti and 16gb RAM.

EDITED - better English and a clarifiction on CPU
Click to expand...
I'm on 441.12 and see my rig specs below... No problems at all. The graphic (shader) tweaks HAVE TO have the ''GeForce Experience'' loaded WITH the drivers.... my advice is steer well clear of this and forget about the tweaks they are NOT worth the invasive hassle of the ''GeForce Bad Experience'' ... so knock off the ?? Load GeForce Experience ?? option when downloading/installing the 441.12 driver. o7
 
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Koben

Koben
I use the 388.00 on a 1060GTX 6Gb and even tested new drivers... reasons to stay at the 388.00:

1. It works prefectly until this very day even with newer games;
2. I can install just the driver itself without the extra crappy stuff;
3. Ability to disabe nVidia telemetry;
4. Able to install the standalone version 2.11.4.0 of GeForce Experience (no login/account creation requires - and it really works better than the others);
 

Morbad

Morbad
Charles Erika von Hackbeil said:
I have a GTX 1070 with a 7700K, 441.20 (which was the RDR Game-Ready-Driver) also caused major stutters for me - not in Elite (didn't test) but in IRacing, which uses a really old engine that shouldn't stress a proper PC at all.

Had to reinstall the old driver first to make my system work well again. Then, RDR2 launcher told me there is a new, updated driver to tackle RDR2 performance issues, 441.34. Installed it and everything's fine again. I don't know why Nvidia don't offer it as a normal download, you can only get it from their support page. Anyway, here's the link:

NVIDIA Support

nvidia.custhelp.com nvidia.custhelp.com
Click to expand...

I updated to 441.34 last night as I was replacing my audio drivers anyway. Nothing perceptably different for me from 441.12, but I don't play RDR2, so that's expected.

Anyway, it's a hotfix driver and likely isn't included in the normal list because it hasn't been validated to the same degree.

Koben said:
2. I can install just the driver itself without the extra crappy stuff;
3. Ability to disabe nVidia telemetry
Click to expand...

This can be done even with the newest drivers, it just requires some manual removal of packages before install.

Koben said:
Able to install the standalone version 2.11.4.0 of GeForce Experience (no login/account creation requires - and it really works better than the others);
Click to expand...

Not sure if the old version of GFE can be used with newer drivers, but I omit GFE entirely as there is very little it does that cannot be done better some other way.
 

Neutronium

Neutronium
In general, I try to keep display drivers up-to-date as much as I can. I really get pi**ed when new version comes out cause this means I have to download half a gig of code, run ccleaner, registry cleaner & windows disk cleaner prior to update, update, restart, clean again junk traces, direct3d & opnegl caches, restart (I don't know if all this is really neccessary but I do it just to be safe). I almost exclusively run very specific games namely ED and SE about 90% of the time. So if something breaks on one of these two after an update, I revert.
Keeping display drivers up-to-date has this advantage. You always have the latest trouble free driver driving your beloved apps and you get the best possible performance. The day which I will no longer see any newer driver for my setup (GPU+OS) is probably the day I will seriously need to consider an upgrade (either GPU, OS or both). For example my older gaming PC which has a weaker gpu vs my main newer one, is running an older OS too: Windows 7 (x64 Ult SP1). So I am expecting that after the end of January 2020, there would be no more driver updates for the GPU cause the limiting factor would be the OS. Maybe Nvidia gives a grace period and releases newer drivers for the unsupported OS but that would not exceed (I think) a max. of one 1 year - probably much less.
 

Koben

Koben
Still using Win7 SP1 x64 as well... and Microsoft just enabled DX12 on it so I guess my PC will stay at its current status until something gets seriously broken. I have no urge or intention to migrate to Win10 at all and my hardware is less than 2yo.
 

d8veh

d8veh
I have i7 and GTX1080. I always update to latest drivers. I've never had a problem with the game because of drivers. A couple of times, the new drivers borked nVidia Experience, so I couldn't record my gameplay, but nVidia Experience won't open unless you have the latest drivers, so I couldn't do anything about that anyway.
 
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