Did Nvidia purposely gimp 700 series cards with the last few drivers?

[SeanBond]

So it was just the other day it occurred to me that my 780ti's performance was down in the gutter compared to what it used to be. After the driver that came out on april 13th (350.12 drivers). it seems like I started to get crashing all the time. Mainly this seemed to be an issue with idle states. I would typically crash every half hour while at the desktop/youtube/netflix/vlc media player ect but not under a gaming load. So, many times over I reinstalled drivers and did clean installs but nothing seemed to fix this issue.

 

I would also like to note since the 350.12 drivers my overclocks are no longer stable. 1200mhz is just seemingly too much for my card now so I have had it dialed back down to 1160mhz since. Another huge eyebrow raiser was the fact a new friend came over and he wanted to see what my computer could do. So naturally I load up crysis 3 and max the game out, I started the first level and immediately noticed my frame rate was dipping as low as 48-54fps wheras before I could play any level in the game at a solid 60fps at 2560x1080 (smaatx2).

 

This was very puzzling. So I called evga and they told me to roll back to drivers from march 17th 347.88 drivers because the newer ones have had issues. Since this morning I have not had one single crash no matter what I have been doing. I loaded up crysis and clocked my card back up to 1200mhz without crashing. Gpu boost even pushed it to 1220 without issue. And loading up the first mission looks like I can run it at the same settings just about 60-70fps which is a massive difference.

 

I have personally never heard of the 700 series having issues with the new drivers up until I watched a video today from gamers nexus. He makes the statement at about 8:45 (his graph and speaking isn't in sync). So yeah, that's pretty much it. Anyone else have performance problems with the new drivers on the 700 series? Unstable overclocks? idle crashing? less fps in older games? And most importantly do you think nvidia has done this on purpose? I mean nearly two months later and nothing has improved from those drivers? I am getting much better results from march drivers which is sad.

[Sauron]

It may just be a bad driver to be honest, no need to look for hidden meanings unless it goes on for the next releases too.

[Kick]

I have had similar issues with my 600 series cards. Even went to the Nvidia support forums for them where some asshole kept spamming some copy pasta about this. I also rolled back to the 347.88 (or something like that), but have not had the time to test as just after doing that I had some CPU issues...waiting on new cooling stuff to come from UPS today.

 

I would like to believe Nvidia was above such sabotage, but I wouldn't put it past them. 

[minibois]

Time for tin foil hats??

 

I don't know, I don't see them doing that on purpose at least.. Maybe the drivers were not properly made/optimized for 700 series GPU's.

[spyder]

Most probably poor optimisation. 

[Virtual01]

The driver is terrible tbh. I'm stuck with it because I bought a 980ti.

[LancerBG]

happens from time to time. more to drivers then just fps rates. 

[Lord_Karango17]

If the older drivers are more stable, then it would be a bummer for newer games...

 

Honestly I cant say that I have noticed any changes (other than occasional crashes, because precision x keeps turning down my volts, making the card unstable)

[SeanBond]

It may just be a bad driver to be honest, no need to look for hidden meanings unless it goes on for the next releases too.

I would have to agree with this....if not for the fact there has already been 3 driver releases since 350.12. 

 

I have had similar issues with my 600 series cards. Even went to the Nvidia support forums for them where some asshole kept spamming some copy pasta about this. I also rolled back to the 347.88 (or something like that), but have not had the time to test as just after doing that I had some CPU issues...waiting on new cooling stuff to come from UPS today.

 

I would like to believe Nvidia was above such sabotage, but I wouldn't put it past them. 

I would hope they are above it too, but nvidia seems more and more evil to me lately.

 

The driver is terrible tbh. I'm stuck with it because I bought a 980ti.

I don't really understand. In comparison with recent benchmarks 970 and 980 and 980ti are completely crushing everything. Hell im seeing 970's beat out 780ti's in the last few months. This was so different before these drivers.

[Enderman]

Using the latest driver on my 770

No game performance or overclocking issues

 

Just because a driver causes crashes does not mean nvidia is purposefully doing it...its just a bad driver, and there have been many in the past

If you have problems just roll back, no big deal

You dont really gain or lose anything

 

If they wanted to ruin performance on older cards they would make games perform poorly, not make the drivers crash

[SeanBond]

Using the latest driver on my 770

No game performance or overclocking issues

 

Just because a driver causes crashes does not mean nvidia is purposefully doing it...its just a bad driver, and there have been many in the past

If you have problems just roll back, no big deal

You dont really gain or lose anything

 

If they wanted to ruin performance on older cards they would make games perform poorly, not make the drivers crash

I don't believe they would actively try to cause crashing but the performance.... it's just so poo. I hadn't noticed because I have only been playing the witcher 3 and gta the last few months. Which the new drivers seemingly help at the cost of wrecking older games

[Burusutazu]

The latest update to Nvidia's software does not work on my computer, let alone the fact that I can't update to the new driver because of this. (could manual update, but too lazy)

[Lord_Karango17]

So, if I kept games to low/mediums(mostly playing anime games on otaku) the 730 should be fine?  Or, do you think it would also be unstable from the driver?

I don't really know how well a 730 performs, so you will have to do the research, but the driver problems seem to be limited to a few people, so you should be fine...

[GangstaRas]

Things like this has been happening from NVIDIA for ages now with older generation cards. There just comes a point where all the driver updates are causing more harm than good for older generation cards. So I would mark the stable driver you have right now and keep it as the last driver update that won't fail you. You can still try to update to the later driver updates but they may/may never fix the issue ever again.

[SeanBond]

Things like this has been happening from NVIDIA for ages now with older generation cards. There just comes a point where all the driver updates are causing more harm than good for older generation cards. So I would mark the stable driver you have right now and keep it as the last driver update that won't fail you. You can still try to update to the later driver updates but they may/may never fix the issue ever again.

This is a terrifying thought.

[Enderman]

I don't believe they would actively try to cause crashing but the performance.... it's just so poo. I hadn't noticed because I have only been playing the witcher 3 and gta the last few months. Which the new drivers seemingly help at the cost of wrecking older games

yeah that happens sometimes

they make driver optimizations for the latest games but dont test the impact on older games

so you kinda have to choose which you want most

[Hunter259]

Will people stop the maddness. http://www.bytemedev.com/the-gtx-780-ti-sli-end-of-life-driver-performance-analysis/

[SeanBond]

Will people stop the maddness. http://www.bytemedev.com/the-gtx-780-ti-sli-end-of-life-driver-performance-analysis/

The only testing was done with firestrike? Fantastic, a ton of useless information.

[Hunter259]

The only testing was done with firestrike? Fantastic, a ton of useless information.

How in hell is that worthless? You have facts. None of this is happening.

[Camisto]

Not just 700's. had to revert to 350.12 to get it to stop crashing on chrome with a 970.  Just do a search on "driver crash" and you will see many threads complaining about 900's crashing and such and the fix has always been to roll back the driver.

[Acquire]

They had problems with drivers for Kepler cards for a few months. Their latest drivers have resolved those issues. It wasn't sabotage. It was just bad drivers. Bad drivers happen.

[SeanBond]

They had problems with drivers for Kepler cards for a few months. Their latest drivers have resolved those issues. It wasn't sabotage. It was just bad drivers. Bad drivers happen.

The newest official drivers for me have done nothing. However someone has shown me a new driver that isn't listed on the normal site. @othertomperson showed me http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3694/~/geforce-hotfix-driver-353.38

 

As far as I can tell, this driver has been a fix as far as performance for old games while keeping performance for the newer ones and I haven't crashed since the driver update with this. Normally I crash every half our when idle or watching videos. It's been nearly two hours. So hopefully the dark months are behind me.

[flowalex]

I'm running the latest driver on a 700 series card and the only time it crashed was when I ran firestrike ultra