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 do 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 Riva TNT, an NVIDIA product from 1998. There was a famous driver for
the Riva 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 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? 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, NVIDIA 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 4080s, it's often switched off for the entire lovelace 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 Radeon drivers and something that the two companies
have publicly criticized each other on. Of course, AMD has also had issues with its drivers at times
with their anti-leg plus feature causing gamers to run into problems with anti-cheat 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 DirectX 12 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 DirectX 12 spec
when they actually believe they're following it. So I wouldn't expect those hotfix drivers that
target a specific problem to go away anytime soon. It's not exactly like trillion-dollar companies
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