if you've got an NVIDIA graphics card you may have noticed that the majority
of their driver updates are labeled as game ready drivers with the idea being
that in addition to Bringing General updates that benefit everyone these
drivers are optimized for a specific new game and are released very near or even
on the game's launch day but guess what with a few exceptions downloading the
latest driver for your graphics card probably isn't going to give you a
massive performance boost even in that new game huh so what are they they
actually do well we'll get to that but first a quick history nugget it turns
out this misconception about performance goes all the way back to the days of the
Reva TNT an NVIDIA product from 1998
there was a famous driver for the Reva TNT called Detonator that actually did
boost performance significantly due to the inclusion of optimizations for AMD
CPUs that previous drivers lacked this
was great press for NVIDIA but unfortunately it ended up setting
setting an expectation that drivers would be some kind of Silver Bullet for
performance issues the issue with that is they're usually not and a big part of
the reason it's rare to see big performance jumps with new drivers these
days is that devs work closely with NVIDIA while the game is in development
this isn't to say you never see significant performance increases with
new NVIDIA drivers but it's not as common as you might think especially as
tweaks to the drivers are often made with specific games in mind well before
launch meaning that if you've updated your drivers with any regularity there's
a good chance your game will perform just fine even if you're not yet using
the specific game ready driver for that game NVIDIA has over an 80% market share
in the discrete GPU market so it probably isn't a surprise that they have
plenty of contacts at Major game studios there's actually a regular Cadence where
NVIDIA sends out pre-release drivers to developers on Mondays and from there
there's back and forth between the game developers and the NVIDIA folks to get
things to play as nicely as possible before launch day and while NVIDIA can't
possibly test every single Hardware configuration they do have over 4500
combinations they test that go all the way back to 2012 as of the time this
video was shot in case you were wondering this is how they figure out
what the optimal settings for your PC are in GeForce experience but enough
context already what specifically about these drivers do they tweak before
release we'll tell you right after we thank the sponsor of this video
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off rather than pushing drivers to squeeze every possible frame per second
from an upcoming game the general approach with game ready drivers is to
ensure stability for example NVIDIA has outright disabled resizable bar support
for certain games as it actually caused performance degradation with certain
Hardware configurations something that notably happened with Hitman world of
assassination where NVIDIA turned off the feature on systems with Intel CPUs
to prevent a performance hit but if you had an AMD CPU in left resizable bar on
because it wasn't causing performance issues that's not fair not only that
tweaks like this tend to be for an entire product stack so for example if
there's a problem with an optional feature that's being seen with a lot of RTX 480s it's often switched off for the
entire love lace architecture instead of creating a situation where that feature
has to get retested on a per card basis for every subsequent driver release and
of course resizable bar is just one of a huge number of levers NVIDIA can pull
dlss other AI features and the actual Cuda cores themselves all need to be
able to support a massive number of games which is part of the reason modern
GPU drivers have gotten so huge your new game ready driver has specific code
describing how to behave when you're playing this specific new game NVIDIA
has actually tried to strip out unnecessary components to get driver
sizes down from around a Gigabyte to around 600 megabytes which is still
pretty gigantic and with all of those variables game ready drivers still can
and sometimes do cause issues even after extensive testing this is part of the
reason NVIDIA also offers Studio drivers geared toward even greater stability for
Content creators which aren't pushed out as frequently as game ready drivers the
issues that game ready drivers sometimes face are a possible point in favor of
AMD's slower release Cadence for its whql certified radon drivers and
something that the two companies have publicly critici ized each other on of
course AMD has also had issues with its drivers at times with their anti-ag plus
feature causing Gamers to run into problems with anti-che software in late
2023 standing out as an example so
slower cadences aren't necessarily a perfect solution either and the
industry's transition towards the directx12 API has actually shifted more
of the onus for getting things right towards the game developers and away
from GPU companies the intent behind this is to give Developers more control
over their own game engines but an unintended and common consequence has
been that devs can violate the directx12 spec when they actually believe they're
following it so I wouldn't expect those hot fix drivers that Target a specific
problem to go away anytime soon it's not exactly like trillion dollar companies
can't make mistakes hey thanks for watching that whole video like it if you
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