WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.920 If you've got an NVIDIA graphics card, you may have noticed that the majority of their 00:00:03.920 --> 00:00:09.920 driver updates are labeled as game-ready drivers, with the idea being that, in addition to bringing 00:00:09.920 --> 00:00:15.280 general updates that benefit everyone, these drivers are optimized for a specific new game 00:00:15.280 --> 00:00:21.280 and are released very near or even on the game's launch day. But guess what? With a few exceptions, 00:00:21.280 --> 00:00:26.320 downloading the latest driver for your graphics card probably isn't going to give you a massive 00:00:26.320 --> 00:00:32.240 performance boost, even in that new game. Huh? So what do they actually do? Well, we'll get to that. 00:00:32.240 --> 00:00:37.280 But first, a quick history nugget. It turns out this misconception about performance goes all 00:00:37.280 --> 00:00:44.160 the way back to the days of the Riva TNT, an NVIDIA product from 1998. There was a famous driver for 00:00:44.160 --> 00:00:51.040 the Riva TNT called Detonator. That actually did boost performance significantly due to the inclusion 00:00:51.040 --> 00:00:57.840 of optimizations for AMD CPUs that previous drivers lacked. This was great press for NVIDIA, 00:00:57.840 --> 00:01:02.480 but unfortunately it ended up setting an expectation that drivers would be some kind 00:01:02.480 --> 00:01:07.680 of silver bullet for performance issues. The issue with that is they're usually not, 00:01:07.680 --> 00:01:12.720 and a big part of the reason it's rare to see big performance jumps with new drivers these days 00:01:12.720 --> 00:01:18.560 is that devs work closely with NVIDIA while the game is in development. This isn't to say you 00:01:18.560 --> 00:01:23.600 never see significant performance increases with new NVIDIA drivers, but it's not as common as you 00:01:23.600 --> 00:01:28.640 might think. Especially as tweaks to the drivers are often made with specific games in mind 00:01:28.640 --> 00:01:33.360 well before launch. Meaning that if you've updated your drivers with any regularity, 00:01:33.360 --> 00:01:38.720 there's a good chance your game will perform just fine even if you're not yet using the specific 00:01:38.720 --> 00:01:45.520 game ready driver for that game. NVIDIA has over an 80% market share in the discrete GPU market, 00:01:45.520 --> 00:01:50.080 so it probably isn't a surprise that they have plenty of contacts at major game studios. 00:01:50.080 --> 00:01:55.120 There's actually a regular cadence where NVIDIA sends out pre-release drivers to developers on 00:01:55.120 --> 00:01:59.440 Mondays, and from there, there's back and forth between the game developers and the NVIDIA folks 00:01:59.440 --> 00:02:05.440 to get things to play as nicely as possible before launch day. And while NVIDIA can't possibly test 00:02:05.440 --> 00:02:12.240 every single hardware configuration, they do have over 4500 combinations they test that go all the 00:02:12.240 --> 00:02:17.520 way back to 2012 as of the time this video was shot. In case you were wondering, this is how 00:02:17.520 --> 00:02:23.360 they figure out what the optimal settings for your PC are in GeForce Experience. But enough context 00:02:23.360 --> 00:02:28.480 already, what specifically about these drivers do they tweak before release? Rather than pushing 00:02:28.480 --> 00:02:34.160 drivers to squeeze every possible frame per second from an upcoming game, the general approach with 00:02:34.160 --> 00:02:39.520 game ready drivers is to ensure stability. For example, NVIDIA has outright disabled 00:02:39.600 --> 00:02:44.560 resizable bar support for certain games as it actually caused performance degradation with 00:02:44.560 --> 00:02:49.920 certain hardware configurations. Something that notably happened with Hitman World of Assassination 00:02:49.920 --> 00:02:54.960 where NVIDIA turned off the feature on systems with Intel CPUs to prevent a performance hit. 00:02:54.960 --> 00:03:00.320 But if you had an AMD CPU, NVIDIA left resizable bar on because it wasn't causing performance 00:03:00.320 --> 00:03:06.240 issues. That's not fair. Not only that, tweaks like this tend to be for an entire product stack. 00:03:06.240 --> 00:03:10.160 So for example, if there's a problem with an optional feature that's being seen with a lot 00:03:10.160 --> 00:03:16.400 of RTX 4080s, it's often switched off for the entire lovelace architecture instead of creating 00:03:16.400 --> 00:03:22.480 a situation where that feature has to get retested on a per card basis for every subsequent driver 00:03:22.480 --> 00:03:28.640 release. And of course, resizable bar is just one of a huge number of levers NVIDIA can pull. 00:03:28.640 --> 00:03:34.800 DLSS, other AI features and the actual CUDA cores themselves all need to be able to support a massive 00:03:34.800 --> 00:03:40.160 number of games, which is part of the reason modern GPU drivers have gotten so huge. Your new 00:03:40.160 --> 00:03:45.440 game ready driver has specific code describing how to behave when you're playing this specific new 00:03:45.440 --> 00:03:51.120 game. NVIDIA has actually tried to strip out unnecessary components to get driver sizes down 00:03:51.120 --> 00:03:56.640 from around a Gigabyte to around 600 megabytes, which is still pretty gigantic. And with all of 00:03:56.640 --> 00:04:02.720 those variables, game ready drivers still can and sometimes do cause issues, even after extensive 00:04:02.720 --> 00:04:08.640 testing. This is part of the reason NVIDIA also offers studio drivers geared toward even greater 00:04:08.640 --> 00:04:14.000 stability for content creators, which aren't pushed out as frequently as game ready drivers. 00:04:14.000 --> 00:04:19.760 The issues that game ready drivers sometimes face are a possible point in favor of AMD's 00:04:19.760 --> 00:04:25.840 slower release cadence for its WHQL certified Radeon drivers and something that the two companies 00:04:25.840 --> 00:04:32.080 have publicly criticized each other on. Of course, AMD has also had issues with its drivers at times 00:04:32.080 --> 00:04:36.800 with their anti-leg plus feature causing gamers to run into problems with anti-cheat software 00:04:36.800 --> 00:04:42.800 in late 2023, standing out as an example. So slower cadences aren't necessarily a perfect 00:04:42.800 --> 00:04:48.960 solution either. And the industry's transition towards the DirectX 12 API has actually shifted 00:04:48.960 --> 00:04:54.720 more of the onus for getting things right towards the game developers and away from GPU companies. 00:04:54.720 --> 00:04:59.360 The intent behind this is to give developers more control over their own game engines, 00:04:59.360 --> 00:05:05.760 but an unintended and common consequence has been that devs can violate the DirectX 12 spec 00:05:05.760 --> 00:05:11.120 when they actually believe they're following it. So I wouldn't expect those hotfix drivers that 00:05:11.120 --> 00:05:17.200 target a specific problem to go away anytime soon. It's not exactly like trillion-dollar companies 00:05:17.200 --> 00:05:21.760 can't make mistakes. Hey, thanks for watching that whole video! 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