Gadgetory

it feels like every driver update we get from Nvidia prompts a huge spike in forum posts and angry tweet saying Nvidia ruined my FPS in game X with driver y YY dot VZ and and 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 going to tell you after these messages browse privately and securely with tunnel bear the simple VPN app starts your seven day free trial at the link in the video description now before we really get into this I want to clarify that I've been a longtime skeptic when it comes to nvidia and AMD conspiracy theories they are 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 Hertz performance to Nvidia broken how please 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 point eight six drivers 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 game works then to ensure we weren't missing out on a particular architecture that got neat 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 card 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 3 metric asked tons of data then he sat down to organize it into some charts and the results are astonishingly boring the most recent release seems to be a bit of 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 miniscule nature of these improvements it's hard to see where they actually start an end so we're not much closer to a clear picture of nvidia x' 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 point eight-six hurt performance and sli issues seem to come and go like shadow from final fantasy 6 so what is going on then where are people getting these ideas we think the perception mostly stems from this when a new game launches older GPUs don't get the whole optimization treatment the way that the current ones would that means that you might run into situations where all their cards with more raw power might be beat by newer ones with less text boss 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 780ti and there's another major factor the tech not all graphic 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 are right on the horizon examples would be Nvidia specific features like hair works or general rendering techniques like HP ao+ 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 guess 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 tessellation Nvidia cards were and still seem to be much faster at rendering tessellated meshes to such a degree that AMD had to add AMD optimized 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 on ass all day I mean look at it from their perspective if they don't optimize this 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 optimization 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 weeding your wallet dry that one's up to you you know what the funny thing about Squarespace is all of their gorgeous website templates feature responsive design so your website looks great whether it's on a square screen or a rectangular one or even if you do it this way and the best thing about Squarespace is they make it so anyone can build a website it 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should totally join 380 4.76 wait they make my brain hurt there were small but no I would hate that after these messages do these messages and now I am these messages now