Driver and DLL juggling *spawn*

That is very a narrow view you people are self imposing on yourselves. Issues with multi-screen with bugs spanning dual and triple setups, issues with refresh rates and sometimes gsync in such setups, issues with heavy stutters in such odd setups and in VR, issues with shadowplay audio sync, issues with hdmi audio, issues with general performance on older MP titles.


You just have to take a look at the bug fixes in each driver release. Each bug fixed, was a bug someone had.


Its more than conceivable the idea of people having to downgrade a driver for a multitude of reasons. So you people are not discussing the subject, you are discussing me personally, even though I am not the one spouting lies as demonstrated by others in this very topic.

 

The majority of gamers isnt having much if any trouble regarding drivers from either NV or AMD or any drivers these days. Its hard to understand why thats called a narrow view but ok
I could potentionally have agreed 20 years ago, but nowadays, its a non-issue. Ofcourse theres problems, but thats for every computer system out there.
Back in the mid 90's to later 90's somewhere, drivers could be a struggle for a larger part of the market, but nowadays?

 

Can you quantify, what percentage of gamers is experiencing the problems you mention and how many switch back and forth their drivers? Just to see, how much we're narrowing our view and how narrow or not this "very common" behaviour is?

You did state this as a fact, so as usual in a civil discussion, you have to bring proof.

 

I have a friend using a 2070 that reverted to older drivers for stuff in the past. Nvidia introduced a bug in red dead redemption 2 that caused some textures to be invisible, which was a bit of a problem.

More recently they fixed a bug that caused flickering in WoW. One of the biggest wow fansites even referenced using older drivers in their news update about it
https://www.wowhead.com/news/nvidia-driver-471-11-fixes-random-flickering-in-shadowlands-323001

 

TF2 did not get a single major update in 3 years or so /sad heavy noises. Updates that sometimes get dropped on TF2 are usually tiny localisation fixes and new community items (and they can't fix the bot problem for a year or so, sometimes it's literally you vs 10 bots in your team and the other team)

 

What was called a "narrow view" was your attempt do dismiss the activity of rolling back drivers solely based on "users looking for some % of performance deltas". The rest of your reply is semantics and exaggerated hyperbole.

Are you seriously requiring large scale census of the dimension of the steam hardware charts in order to prove the commonality of rolling back drivers? you must be out of your collective minds. Evidence was presented. Use the cues to search more by yourself.




The hurdles someone must go through in this forum just because some aspect of the nvidia empire was classified as "less than perfect".

Active lying, semantics, hyperboles, no integrity, context removal and selective reading, anecdotal personal experiences as proof of non-existence, calling "idiots" to those who roll back drivers.... This is not beyond3D, this is not even resetera. This is Neogaf.

 

Is it too much to ask for some civility? Or do folks really want mandated site vacations?

 

If you are referring to me and the post you just deleted, the idiots remark was not mine, and the post claiming others to be idiots remains above and agreed by at least 10 people. If that post remains, and If I reference them in a separate post, I am only stating whats constitutes a truth. I dont understand why you would delete it.

 

I myself rarely update my drivers out of laziness, and also because I'm not able/willing to upgrade my PC so all I've been playing are classics like Civ6, and the drivers matter very little in that context.

What I don't get is the apparent necessity in this thread to crap on the people who do keep tabs on what drivers provide the better performance and compatibility for what games.
Those guys were lifesavers to me when I needed them on the internet, but in B3D (or rather this very consistent group of 5 users who always put likes in each others' posts) they're somehow considered a bad thing.

What a strange stance to have. Is it because nvidia apparently launched one bad driver and that must be swept under the usual rug of ad-hominems?

 

That happens across vendors, in certain games some bugs persist across driver versions, for example Forza 7, GTA V, Red Dead Redemption 2, World Of Warcraft, Batman Arkham Knight all exhibited some form of rendering corruption on various AMD and NVIDIA drivers, they were documented and users were advised to avoid such drivers till the problems are fixed. This is a far cry from the claims of driver juggling back and forth that the majority of users are supposedly experiencing.

 

Looks back to the days where if i wanted a particular game to use glide 2.41 instead of 2.43 which was the system default I could just put the 2.41 glide dll in the game folder.

 

I was thinking back to Glide too...
But I guess a lot of muppets are online and old stuff become "bad habbits".
I see muppets using drivercleaners with each install new driver install..."bad habbit" from the past dragged to a new reality.
I havn't seen muppets swapping driver for each game before ("bad habbit" from the past dragged to a new reality.)...but I see a claim that is is very common....but I lack any form of documentation for the claim.

And that is the crux...a claim with no data but a lot of fluff.

 

But if you play one game that needs an older version, and a different game that needs a newer driver... What do you do?

 

You finish playing one game, install the new driver and play the other one.

And to be clear - this isn't something which is happening as a norm, it's an exception. For my 25 years of gaming I've ran into such situation maybe once or twice. In all other cases the latest driver is fine.

 

Sure, that works for single player games that you play once and then delete. But if you noticed the two examples I gave, wow, and rdr2 (red dead online), they are online games with content updates and you might play both at the same time on different days (raids in wow on some days, rdr on others).

And before you say this is some hypothetical situation, I play both games with my wife and a few friends.

 

I don’t have a horse in this race, but I do write drivers for a living and I’ve definitely had situations where a given API call has many possible mappings to hardware, and we have to choose one. And what’s optimal for one app might be suboptimal for another app, so generally we choose the path that’s the best for the most number of / most popular apps. Which changes over time... So there is technical plausibility that a new graphics driver could regress performance of older games, if the driver happened to switch how it implements a certain API used by the game.

As an aside, I also find it pretty funny that some of the people on this thread arguing that hardly anyone would ever want to switch drivers for games, are the same people over on the DLSS thread exchanging tips on which is the best DLSS .dll for each game.