it feels like every driver update we get
from NVIDIA prompts a huge spike in
forum posts and angry tweets saying NVIDIA ruined my FPS in
game x with driver yyyy.
it and we're gonna tell you after these messages
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now before we really get into this i want to clarify that i've been a long
time 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 375.86
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 gameworks then to ensure we weren't missing out on
a particular architecture that got kneecapped 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 cards 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 three metric ass 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 turret 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 minuscule nature of these improvements
it's hard to see where they actually start and end so we're not much closer
to a clear picture of NVIDIA's 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 375.86 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 full
optimization treatment the way that the current ones would
that means that you might run into situations where older cards with more
raw power might be beat by newer ones
with less tech spot 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 780 ti
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 hbao
plus 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 guessed 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 crisis too
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 bleeding your wallet dry
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so thanks for watching guys let us know if there are any other brands or
conspiracy theories like this that you'd like us to investigate if this video
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you should totally join 384.76 wait they make my brain hurt
there were small but no
i always hate that after these messages these messages
and now i am these messages damn