AMD and Nvidia's 2014 driver progress

[HEXUS]

How did both companies fare with driver improvements?

Read more.

[kalniel]

Good article, but hell no - not time for a driver update! I think the Omega driver from AMD is the way things should go - a really concentrated effort on getting rid of bugs and things that detract from user experience. For 5% improvement you should just OC the card if you need it.

[KeyboardDemon]

After reading the article I couldn't help but think that there was nothing surprising in the outcome or the results.

Though I'm happy to see that both camps have shown almost equal gains and I feel that both brands are now a lot better at producing quality drivers for great graphics cards all around.

[Mauley]

I switched over to Nvidia just before the Omega driver came out and i'd have like to have seen how it fared with my old card.

this is all good news for the PC master race though. Things will only get better this year....we hope.

[ET3D]

Now I'm curious as to the Intel drivers performance gains.

[MrRockliffe]

As above, I'd rather have a bug fix. Currently plagued with 1440p issues on my 760. Random crashes, no overclocking capability etc

[tribaljet]

While it's welcome to see performance gains as drivers get released, it should be noted that Kepler cards have had their performance ever so slightly reduced (gimped?) in favor of 2nd gen Maxwell cards. Aside from that, it's good to see performance improvements from both fields.

[keithwalton]

27% gain for the 780ti in grid autosport seems way to high. It's more like 12.5%.

This topic is a tricky one to review, as a performance gain can be viewed two ways.

Either they have turned a bad driver to a good one.
or a good driver to a great driver.

Only small increases across the board would suggest both manufacturers have started from an excellent position.

Go back 15 years and driver updates could yield massive performance gains of over 100% increases

[DemonHighwayman]

While it's welcome to see performance gains as drivers get released, it should be noted that Kepler cards have had their performance ever so slightly reduced (gimped?) in favor of 2nd gen Maxwell cards. Aside from that, it's good to see performance improvements from both fields.

I was just going to say that if the same tests were repeated in 2-3 years when the featured cards are a few generations behind it would make some interesting reading.
When Crysis first came out I could run it smoothly at 1680x1050 on my 8800 ultra, my next card a GTX 280 had similar performance, a few years later using an AMD 5870 it seemed a bit stuttery and throughout those years I was gaming at the same resolution.

Interesting article though, please repeat in 2-3 years with the latest drivers.

[RyanM]

I was just going to say that if the same tests were repeated in 2-3 years when the featured cards are a few generations behind it would make some interesting reading.
When Crysis first came out I could run it smoothly at 1680x1050 on my 8800 ultra, my next card a GTX 280 had similar performance, a few years later using an AMD 5870 it seemed a bit stuttery and throughout those years I was gaming at the same resolution.

Interesting article though, please repeat in 2-3 years with the latest drivers.

Wouldn't repeating now with 2-3 year old cards be a better idea, GTX 480 and GTX 580?

[glass geezer]

Never mind performance improvements - my NVidia driver has done nothing but fault since the November updates, and it seems to get worse with each release.

[RyanM]

Never mind performance improvements - my NVidia driver has done nothing but fault since the November updates, and it seems to get worse with each release.

Remove all existing AMD/Nvidia/Intel graphics drivers with DisplayDriverUninstaller[DDU - available at Guru3D, just google for the latest version]

Then download and install the latest nvidia driver for your card and OS from nvidia.com/drivers

If you've already given this a try then ignore me! But I think it's worth a try, clean driver installs fix a lot of problems in my experience.

[tribaljet]

Wouldn't repeating now with 2-3 year old cards be a better idea, GTX 480 and GTX 580?

Not really since official support has ended on prior driver releases, and Fermi optimizations have ended even further, specifically on Windows 8 drivers (not 8.1).

Remove all existing AMD/Nvidia/Intel graphics drivers with DisplayDriverUninstaller[DDU - available at Guru3D, just google for the latest version]

Then download and install the latest nvidia driver for your card and OS from nvidia.com/drivers

If you've already given this a try then ignore me! But I think it's worth a try, clean driver installs fix a lot of problems in my experience.

^This.

[tygrus]

A large improvement from 1st release to 1 or more years later could mean one of 2 things: the initial release had bad drivers which cheated buyers; or they spent a lot of effort over the time to improve what they had. On the other hand, seeing only a small improvement could mean either: the initial drivers were excellent and no amount of effort could make a large improvement; or the initial drivers were poor and the made little effort to improve over time; or the initial drivers had reduced image quality to improve performance that while overtime the performance hasn't changed maybe the image quality has.

Is it better to release the HW with bad drivers then have a greater improvement; or release with better drivers and see less improvement overtime in reviews such as this ???

Why do optimisations in driver updates seem so targeted at specific games/apps ? How much of the so called "driver" is GPU family specific replacement of specific game code which is identified and substituted ? or is it just OpenGL/DirectX code changed ? or just the GPU driver side of the process ?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Thanks Hexus for being one of the few sites who bother to do this sort of study.For me on the Nvidia side,the major improvements were the more stable 340 series drivers as the some of the 330 branch had known issues.

[MrRockliffe]

That's interesting, since 330 was more stable for me... Which card do you own?