I’ll be playing a game, and then one day it won’t work. After updating my graphics drivers, it works again. But the game didn’t receive an update, so why does it just break?
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Modern, performant computer graphics is an incredibly complex topic full of hacks, workarounds, and edge cases. It’s possible that an update to DirectX/OpenGL/Vulkan caused some edge case interaction between the application and the graphics pipeline to fail somewhere. Updating the GPU driver (mesa, nvidia, amdgpu, or whatever Windows equivalent) could mitigate that failure.
I remember having to update the Nvidia Windows driver when Cyberpunk 2077 was released to fix an issue related to transparent foliage (transparency is always a pain in the ass to deal with).
hacks, workarounds, and edge cases
That’s always what I thought when they release a new driver for a specific game. I’m like “seriously? Do they check the executable or something?” Yes, yes they do.
They do that on Linux as well. Depending on the name of your Doom 3 executable you’d get different performance, if I recall correctly.
It’s always funny to see that drivers and operating systems are littered with workarounds for (in my eyes) shoddy bugs in downstream applications.
When hardware meet firmware, especially as complex as a GPU, there will always be unpredictable bugs.
Mix that with every company that uses your driver differently, and computer hardware variation, you can’t cover all edge cases.
Other things that have been broken by one update and fixed by new drivers were shadows in Oblivion not rendering and Arkham Asylum crashing at a specific moment if physx was anabled.
Meanwhile I’ll go 6mos to a year before even thinking of updating my 1080ti and never once have issues.
OS updates can do this.
^This. I can tell every time my pc updates by the fact that nothing ever works correctly anymore.
Literally just downloaded video drivers yesterday due to this, and I have the vast majority of auto updates turned off for windows… Every update moves me closer to switching Os entirely.
Every update moves me closer to switching Os entirely.
Dooo eeeet.
You can pause Windows update for a little over a month at a time so that you’re not surprised by any automatic restarts, FYI
My guess is that your OS changed.
But I wouldn’t put some GPU manufacturers breaking your hardware on purpose completely out of the picture.
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speaking of which, what’s a good way to keep all my drivers updated? I feel like I’ve been slacking on that.
On Windows, a lot of motherboard vendors would ship their own update utility, however the issue is that in 9 out of 10 cases, that utility would also install some useless garbage on the side, and hog the resources, while not really doing anything. In other cases, Windows itself can provide you with updates, for the devices it recognizes
On Linux? Update packages and reboot.
On Windows? I think Nvidia is updated by Windows Update, but you’ll have to manually download the online updater tool for AMD cards. There’s really no good method to automate it on Windows other than clicking on the pop-ups, which I find equally hilarious and embarrassing.
On Windows you can use NVCleanstall, which will notify you when there’s a driver update, download the installer for you, and even strip out Nvidia’s telemetry and bloatware from the installer before running it.
The bloatware and telemetry removal is the best part. There’s like twenty components in a default Nvidia driver installation and you only really need maybe three to run games.
Nvidia and AMD both have programs that’ll let you know when you have a driver update. It’ll handle it automatically past you needing to click ‘go’, from what I remember(I haven’t had a Nvidia gpu in a few years.) For AMD it’s called Adrenaline, and for Nvidia it’s Geforce Experience.
I don’t find that anything but GPUs really need regular driver updates.
Is your game completely offline, or does it have automatic updates pushed via steam or similar? If a background game update changed an api call or two in the way it handles graphics, its possible that your current graphics drivers dont support the new implementation.
An ideal system would do a version check for what is installed on your system and recommend a gfx driver update before pulling down such a game update, but our world is far from ideal.
