Driver update, do old hardware also get performance improvements?

mottledleek · March 11, 2013

I am kinda wondering, every time i see new drivers being released, all i see noted on the release notes are improvements just for the current generations of GPUs.

And if somehow, older generation cards also benefit from performance improvements?

ie: AMD and Nvidia releases Crysis 3 optimized drivers. Does it also cover older gen cards in the list too for having that optimizations for crysis 3?

FloRolf · March 11, 2013

Yeah, sure you get an improvement on your older cards in for example crysis 3. this is because its a brand new game and no gpu has a "gaming profile" for it or is optimized. They just name their new cards because they get the biggest improvements in older game titles because there the cards are newer. Also, you sometimes get nice new features like fxaa, adaptive vsync... (nvidia, i have no idea of amd drivers ^^)

mottledleek · March 12, 2013

Really? I was always under the impression that only newest gen cards get all the performance boost. And they just copy over along the last driver made for the last gen cards.

Is there an article that can point out that even a GTX460 or HD5770 did in fact had performance boost overtime as newer and newer drivers gets released?

Thanks for taking the time to answer.