GTX 970 - best driver and Nvidia's crusade on degrading performance in new drivers

[Fixxer8]

Its a simple question, i have the GTX 970, and after the last driver-update i could swear that performance had degraded, not much but still to some degree. Am i beeing paranoid or have other owners of the GTX 970 noticed this?

 

And also, what driver would you guys suggest me rolling back to? If its even possible, without getting a " You' are running older drivers, please update them to the latest one" message smack in your face ?

[Hunched]

I'm sure the person to uncover the Nvidia driver downgrade conspiracy is the guy who isn't sure if installing old drivers is even possible or not.

What a fuckin joke

 

How in the fuck would you even get that message? Do you have GFE installed too? LOL

[Fixxer8]

Im not mad hehe. Oh and the message appeard in Witcher 3 at some point, before updating to a newer driver. I do plan on abit more deep testing, just to see what happens.  

 

 

[LordLeewee]

paranoia. nvidia dont deliberately make their older cards perform badly. 

[zMeul]

I have a GTX970 and running latest drivers

 

Quote

You' are running older drivers, please update them to the latest one

WTF?!

 

[Fixxer8]

Ok, lets say they' dont do it on purpose and im just paranoid. How would i determine the best possible driver for the GTX 970 ? In general

[Fixxer8]

Just now, zMeul said:

I have a GTX970 and running latest drivers

 

WTF?!

 

That message appears when you're on older drivers. Like i am now, a couple of steps behind. Witcher 3 and Rise of the Tomb Raider, pestering me with driver updates for my GTX 970

[zMeul]

2 minutes ago, Fixxer8 said:

Ok, lets say they' dont do it on purpose and im just paranoid. How would i determine the best possible driver for the GTX 970 ? In general

does it crashes?! then it's good

you notice something funky? then test it against the older driver

 

Quote

That message appears when you're on older drivers. Like i am now, a couple of steps behind. Witcher 3 and Rise of the Tomb Raider, pestering me with driver updates for my GTX 970

stop using GFE

wtf are you using it for?!

[Fixxer8]

Removed, been dorment for a while and never really used.. Now that's sorted out. 

Then my second question, alrite. Are there any advantage of having the latest latest driver, or would reverting to an older set, say the one that came out for Witcher 3 be a better option? 

[Fixxer8]

Removed, been dorment for a while and never really used.. Now that's sorted out. 

Then my second question, alrite. Are there any advantage of having the latest latest driver, or would reverting to an older set, say the one that came out for Witcher 3 be a better option?

 

And sorry to give you the wrong impression, its early in the morning and i was convinced by a friend that Nvidia is running a crusade to earn money, by making you buy new graphics-cards  

 

Im not really that crazy 

[don_svetlio]

3 minutes ago, Fixxer8 said:

Removed, been dorment for a while and never really used.. Now that's sorted out. 

Then my second question, alrite. Are there any advantage of having the latest latest driver, or would reverting to an older set, say the one that came out for Witcher 3 be a better option?

 

And sorry to give you the wrong impression, its early in the morning and i was convinced by a friend that Nvidia is running a crusade to earn money, by making you buy new graphics-cards  

 

Im not really that crazy 

Your friend is semi-correct. Support for older GPUs is shit and the newer drivers are not optimized for them. I'd say stick with 361.75 as the ones after are quite bad.

As an example - in Dark Souls 3 - Fermi users would triple their frames per second by going to the drivers from 2012

[Samfisher]

1 hour ago, zMeul said:

does it crashes?! then it's good

you notice something funky? then test it against the older driver

 

stop using GFE

wtf are you using it for?!

ShadowPlay! Wooo!  Still figuring out the right settings for NVENC recording on OBS, man that SP colour degradation ):

[zMeul]

1 hour ago, Samfisher said:

ShadowPlay! Wooo!  Still figuring out the right settings for NVENC recording on OBS, man that SP colour degradation ):

I've seen more color washout from the transcoding software than OBS recording

[Samfisher]

Just now, zMeul said:

I've seen more color washout from the transcoding software than OBS recording

Huh? SP has colour washout, OBS using NVENC supposedly doesn't, and I haven't found a setting that doesn't lag my PC when I start recording with OBS (even with NVENC, not x264) so I just resort to using ShadowPlay instead.

[zMeul]

25 minutes ago, Samfisher said:

Huh? SP has colour washout, OBS using NVENC supposedly doesn't, and I haven't found a setting that doesn't lag my PC when I start recording with OBS (even with NVENC, not x264) so I just resort to using ShadowPlay instead.

this is what I use and I don't have issues with recording

 

[BrightCandle]

Over the last couple of years I have seen at least 2 sites test the claim that Nvidia gimps their driver. Both found a moderate improvement in performance of the card over time in the same games. So the latest drivers are the best. There is no "gimping" of old Nvidia cards, all the data says that is not true it is a false claim.

[i_build_nanosuits]

3 hours ago, don_svetlio said:

Your friend is semi-correct. Support for older GPUs is shit and the newer drivers are not optimized for them. I'd say stick with 361.75 as the ones after are quite bad.

As an example - in Dark Souls 3 - Fermi users would triple their frames per second by going to the drivers from 2012

^^can you believe this?! so much BULLSHIT and it has been selected as the best answer...

i have a GTX 980ti myself and the performance has not gotten worse by any stretch of the imagination.

And Pascal is VERY similar to Maxell in terms of it's architecture...pascal is a shrunken maxwell, overclocked to the hills... so the improvement in driver to make pascal perform better will ALSO benefit maxwell based cards.

 

OP, do not believe in that SHIT...it's COMPLETELY STUPID...it has been proved now that NVIDIA IS NOT GIMPING older cards through drivers in fact it has been revisited quite a bit recently and you can see the results here, the performance improvements are not huge for these older cards but KEEP IN MIND these architecture (Fermi and Kepler) are A LOT different then what nvidia is using for maxwell and pascal...they don't even use tile-based rasterization like the new cards.

 

Keep your driver up to date if you want the best performance out of your card in games.

 

Here, check this video and this link...they did testing on kepler cards and proved that NVIDIA IS NOT gimping older cards...even those...they are different that's why they didn't benefited much from driver optimisation over time...

http://www.babeltechreviews.com/nvidia-forgotten-kepler-gtx-780-ti-vs-290x-revisited/view-all/

''It is clear that the latest generation of DX11/12 games are far more demanding on video cards, but especially regarding vRAM usage.  The GTX 780 Ti is rarely limited by its 3GB of vRAM, and when it happens, the frame rates will often improve dramatically by lowering a few settings.  It is clear that Nvidia has not neglected Kepler, but they are clearly more focused on Maxwell performance as it is their current architecture. ''

[Fixxer8]

Thank you 

6 hours ago, i_build_nanosuits said:

^^can you believe this?! so much BULLSHIT and it has been selected as the best answer...

i have a GTX 980ti myself and the performance has not gotten worse by any stretch of the imagination.

And Pascal is VERY similar to Maxell in terms of it's architecture...pascal is a shrunken maxwell, overclocked to the hills... so the improvement in driver to make pascal perform better will ALSO benefit maxwell based cards.

 

OP, do not believe in that SHIT...it's COMPLETELY STUPID...it has been proved now that NVIDIA IS NOT GIMPING older cards through drivers in fact it has been revisited quite a bit recently and you can see the results here, the performance improvements are not huge for these older cards but KEEP IN MIND these architecture (Fermi and Kepler) are A LOT different then what nvidia is using for maxwell and pascal...they don't even use tile-based rasterization like the new cards.

 

Keep your driver up to date if you want the best performance out of your card in games.

 

Here, check this video and this link...they did testing on kepler cards and proved that NVIDIA IS NOT gimping older cards...even those...they are different that's why they didn't benefited much from driver optimisation over time...

http://www.babeltechreviews.com/nvidia-forgotten-kepler-gtx-780-ti-vs-290x-revisited/view-all/

''It is clear that the latest generation of DX11/12 games are far more demanding on video cards, but especially regarding vRAM usage.  The GTX 780 Ti is rarely limited by its 3GB of vRAM, and when it happens, the frame rates will often improve dramatically by lowering a few settings.  It is clear that Nvidia has not neglected Kepler, but they are clearly more focused on Maxwell performance as it is their current architecture. ''

Thank you for that information.  I really had no other info than that my friend gave me, so you kinda end up beliving it..

I made an utter fool of myself.  Dang it. 

 

Well,  im abit wiser now

[RyGuy99]

2 hours ago, Fixxer8 said:

Thank you 

Thank you for that information.  I really had no other info than that my friend gave me, so you kinda end up beliving it..

I made an utter fool of myself.  Dang it. 

 

Well,  im abit wiser now

I have been running the latest drivers and say an increase in stability for my overclock. It's stability I haven't seen in quite a while. For months and months my once rock solid overclocked was broken from driver updates. At last it is almost where it was before. Granted I did a Windows reinstall so keep that in mind but even before the reinstall I noticed more stability.

 

My main point is that while different drivers may have hurt my overclock stability they haven't hurt stock performance. I always hit a good GPU boost off my OC like I had when I first bought the card.

[alphaproject]

Well, if it isn't broke... I'm using 359.00 and don't have issues... so why update?

[BrightCandle]

2 minutes ago, alphaproject said:

Well, if it isn't broke... I'm using 359.00 and don't have issues... so why update?

Bug fixes, new features. With that attitude you may as well just keep the release drivers, why 359.00?

[Dabombinable]

People accusing Nvidia of decreasing GPU perforamance through driver updates....are straight up wrong on that score. My GTX 650ti OC 2GB which is Kepler proves that, and so does my GTX 970 G1 Gaming (the "upgrade" from the 650ti-which is to this day my favourite graphics card despite being weaker than the 970). I haven't tried with the last drivers, but with the Mobility Radeon HD5650, OpenGL performance was reduced by 2 thirds from the original 2010 driver to the ones that come with Catalyst 13.2 under Windows 7 and 10 with fresh re-installs of Windows, so Windows 7 and 10 weren't at fault for the performance drop. I will be trying the drivers that come with Catalyst 15 (Crimson sucks as it has no OpenCL support in its drivers) to see if AMD restored performance BTW.

[alphaproject]

8 hours ago, BrightCandle said:

Bug fixes, new features. With that attitude you may as well just keep the release drivers, why 359.00?

After this particular release... I did not see any games that would benefit from updating them. I've seen more issues GPU wise after these drivers and since I have zero issues...I don't see why I should upgrade. I play no "new" games. The newest game I've played was Mushroom wars 2 (Beta) and it did not need a 970 to play it. I've seen guys update just because and end up regretting it so I just stayed with what driver seems to not crash my system. Bug fixes you say... like what was in 359 that is fixed, where something else didn't get broken in the later versions? New features... ok, explain them to me?

[brais96]

 

Uses nvidia drivers 368.69 for GTX 970. Now they are only improving the performance of Pascal (the new GTX), but they reduce the performance of maxwell, and the latest updates to improve the performance of maxwell are since they came out Until 368.69. 

          ⬇⬇⬇⬇⬇⬇                ⬇⬇⬇⬇⬇⬇                 ⬇⬇⬇⬇⬇⬇                  ⬇⬇⬇⬇⬇⬇                 ⬇⬇⬇⬇⬇⬇                ⬇⬇⬇⬇⬇⬇

http://www.guru3d.com/files-details/geforce-368-69-whql-driver-download.html

                                         or 

http://www.nvidia.es/download/driverResults.aspx/104829/es

 

I tested it and it worked, the performance increased more than 20%, it makes a clean and customized installation of these drivers, not install in the Geforce experience installer. Greetings.

 

sorry for my english