Keeping your drivers up to date

For all the good they do, the latest drivers aren’t always the best set for your system. New drivers can often unexpectedly break things, so you’ll find that while there are a host of benefits, your particular game of choice or hardware configuration benefits more from the previous version of the drivers.
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It's for this reason that I don't immediately install all new drivers. I rather wait a few days and monitor the forums to make sure that there have been no hassles and then I update my drivers.
 
Can one revert back to the previous drivers before upgrading? I don't want to update only to find out I cannot play my favorite game any more.
 
Hmmm - I think I'm missing a few...

I2lNG.png
 
Worst thing is when you get a new driver and discover he can't operate a stick. :erm:
 
I had a weird driver issue myself. I recently upgraded my wifi router, and, in so doing changed the WPA authentication from WPA1 to WPA2. This left a Vista PC unable to connect. It thought it was connected, but wasn't. After 2 hours of troubleshooting, I notice Vista has updates waiting for installation. Obviously with out a connection, this wasn't possible. I install newer drivers for the wireless card via flash drive, and bingo, it connects without any need to reboot.
 
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Unless you're having performance issues, or an application isn't functioning
as well as it should, leave well alone.

However, the previous version will still be relatively recent; very rarely will an old, outdated driver give you any benefits over new versions.
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I have to disagree with the above, in fact a lot of the ancient Apps I use only work properly on the long forgotten NVidia Detonator Drivers.
 
Newest drivers aren’t always best though
For all the good they do, the latest drivers aren’t always the best set for your system. New drivers can often unexpectedly break things, so you’ll find that while there are a host of benefits, your particular game of choice or hardware configuration benefits more from the previous version of the drivers.

However, the previous version will still be relatively recent; very rarely will an old, outdated driver give you any benefits over new versions.
Click to expand...

I would actually recommend people AGAINST upgrading their graphic card drivers unless something is wrong. nVidia especially releases bad quality drivers - in my experienced any driver that are rushed for "optimization" of a game is bound to be crap.

The statistics are a bit old, but in 2008 nVidia was responsible for 29% of all Windows crashes http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2008/03/28/29-of-windows-vista-crashes-caused-by-nvidia-drivers/.

So for me - find a stable graphics driver and stick with it. Unless a new driver provides a bug fix you absolutely need I don't see the need to destabilize your system for marginal (if any) improvements.

I am running a GTX-260 and had super stable drivers - then BF3 asked to upgrade and I have been swearing since then. My system is louder because the fan runs faster now for some reason and I suddenly have a stutter in games that didn't use to suffer from any before.
 
A vbios update saved my ATI 5870 Asus Notebook from being almost completely useless.
Did take a helluva lot of forum crawling though.

Even today there are still tons of folks out there with "faulty" Grey screen of death (GSOD) G73's out there.
The problem is they blame Asus when the fault was actually with ATI.

A faulty BIOS is without doubt the biggest software related pain in the ass, for hardware it would have to be faulty motherboards, faulty PSU's and last but definitely not least: faulty RAM.
 
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I installed Skyrim again yesterday to see if the so called 25% increase in performance is true. Tested it by running around the market in Riften during day time. My fps ranged from 22-26 with the 285.x driver. There was no change at all after installing the 290.x driver. So the 25% increase doesn't apply in the more demanding situations (for my settings and hardware). My settings are:

Everything set to max with all details enabled except shadows which I set to lowest. (increasing shadows gives me the biggest performance hit)
FXAA enabled
AF set to maximum of 16 samples
AA off
No mods or tweaks apart from disabling mouse acceleration and vsync.
1366x768

Hardware:
T9900 @ 3.4Ghz (3.06 stock)
320M GT 1GB DDR3 @ 675/948/1420 (500/790/1100 stock)
2GB DDR3 ram

My fps normally varies between 20 and 35 in towns and between 30 and 40 in the open world. In caves and indoors with not much lighting effects the fps shoots up over 50.
 
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