Beware: Latest Nvidia GeForce Driver Thoroughly Borked

[Strazdas]

Nvidia just cant get a break nowadays it seems. Disaster follows disaster. AMD PR folks must be drinking champagne.

You know, Microsoft's bright idea was to install GPU drivers for users without their knowledge as well in Windows 10. I'm glad that idea died before it could become reality. Nvidia drivers have been shit for well over a year now. Meanwhile AMD drivers just keep getting better. Strange times we live in.

While AMD is indeed improving lately, it still isnt up to Nvidia drivers quality, except of course this incident.

Windows actually installs a graphic driver itself since windows 7 and if you allow recommended updates to be automatic (as opposed to important updates being automatic) it will also update that driver. That driver however is not the same as the one from your GPU manufacturer and is only enough to browse internet, not play games. so you still got to manually install a proper driver. same goes for Audio driver though most people only notice that when the default windows one starts bugging out.

Thank god I am so unbelivebly lazy that I am two drivers out of date and thank you for the artical letting people know.

thats not lazy, thats just careful. My current video driver is from 2015-07-10. Now THATS lazy. Still runs fine for every game i play so yeah.

I wish NVidia would stop "optimizing" their drivers for specific games and instead just make the damn thing work reliably without "NVidia display driver has stopped responding" popups, hard crashes and other fun times.

The only time i experienced these were when my windows instalation was borked on a laptop. Though i know a few broken games can crash drivers as well.

Do nVidia not have quality control or testers working for them? Seems a pretty big mistake to miss.

since Nvidia still follows WHQL certification on their non-beta drivers, they must have quality control to follow that standard. AMD has opted out of WHQL citing too expensive licensing, but now they also got no reason to do quality control either.

Remember... only AMD makes bad drivers. 267.52 and 320.18 and 196.75 never happened. Nvidia is always perfect!1!!

There is a difference between "its so rare we remember the driver numbers" and "every release"

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

since Nvidia still follows WHQL certification on their non-beta drivers, they must have quality control to follow that standard. AMD has opted out of WHQL citing too expensive licensing, but now they also got no reason to do quality control either.

Well, Quality Control must have rubber stamped those drivers.

 

[Strazdas]

since Nvidia still follows WHQL certification on their non-beta drivers, they must have quality control to follow that standard. AMD has opted out of WHQL citing too expensive licensing, but now they also got no reason to do quality control either.

Well, Quality Control must have rubber stamped those drivers.

Indeed. i cannot understand how this could have gotten WHQL certification considering its issues. perhaps the certificate testers were just very lucky and didnt encounter these problems. shit happens i guess. I think this was caused by Vulcan since this is the first driver that supposedly support Vulcan and it may have been a bigger change than most.

 

[Strazdas]

Strazdaz, as an Nvidia user (the same !!!GPUs!!!(plural) as your own) I disagree. The last 3 years Nvidia was for sure worse. Not terrible but worse than AMD's. I can remember 2 AMD driver releases with Issues from the past 5 years.

I know you are an Nvidia fanboy, but the thing is... that is irrelevant. AMD drivers are honestly, nowadays... better. I have no idea how it was in days past (as I updated more rarely, like you do now) but if the "it burns so hot or uses more power than the sun" jokes are to be taken as an example, then AMD had at least decent drivers all the time.

Nvidia does not need to catch a break. In fact it needs a lot more of this bad PR these days. A steady market share loss on the GPU front as well. That is what they need to become good again.

Less stable, higher overhead, not always up to date with the game releases (though i blame developers for borking games more than driver makers here) is not better. Im not talking about catastrophical failures like this. im talking about simply being not as good software.

The Fermi cards were nuclear reactors, but outside of that, AMD cards were always hotter.

Id rather have AMD bring new good cards and compete to make nvidia better. Simply making Nvidia worse, then seeing it get back up and claiming "its an improvement" isnt a good tactic.

 

[Albino Boo]

As I said, "in my experience" I have heard of very few such cases. Very few ("not that it doesn't happen" + "far from common") being different then none. I've dealt with a lot of computers, and with support systems that have dealt with thousands more, and ATI driver issues far outweighed any Nvidia issues that came across my desk. But anecdotal is always anecdotal.

http://richg42.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-driver-quality.html explained many of the issues I did see, and how the entire ecosystem is a tangle of crap all the way down.

The situation with vendor B (AMD) is not unlike the software situation with a well known aircraft manufacture that may or may not be based in Seattle. The blue screen of death is literal with that software.

 

[Strazdas]

Less stable? Incorrect.

Higher overhead? Correct but there is a reason for that.

Up to date with game releases? To me irrelevant. The game is not playable ANYWAY. You need to wait 1-2-3 months till it can be played at all as almost all games are basically broken.

Irony is EVEN without drivers AMD cards often do better or just as good as Nvidia cards with drivers. So much for game ready drivers (those usually do almost nothing anyway, mostly memory management for Gimperon 970 and SLI profiles with a few bugs squashed).

I wont buy Nvidia anyway these days (till they get kicked a bit more that is) so it does not matter what they bring out. Their DX12 performance so far is ... mediocre at best. Anti-competitive mediocre BS is also a big No no.
We shall see of course, but buying Pascal now would be really humorous for me, Strazdaz

Yes, sadly AMD drivers are still not as stable as Nvidia, though they are much much better than what they were even 5 years ago.

It may be irrelevant for you and me that new released dont instantly work, but there is a vast amount of gamers that do care about being able to play on day one. the day-one sales and pre-orders prove it.

AMD cards dont do better on synthetic tests and only do better in games where developers worked very closely with AMD guys. they arent more powerful in raw power terms, quite the opposite. To add to that, AMD cards are great at doing raw math, but not that great at graphics, whereas its the opposite for Nvidia, which is why Nvidia performed better on videogames front and AMD was the card of choice for bitcoin miners. Considering that on Enthusiast level AMD cards come out later and still only do on par with AMD except the titan flagship that hasnt been beaten (but i dont really count that as videogame card, its for server renderers, not for home computers).

Now it is interesting what AMD will bring out for next gen since the hype promises a lot, but we saw that kind of hype with Bulldozer and it turned out to be false, so i wont be holding my breath. I do hope AMD get better, i want both manufacturers to get better. that would be the only good way for the market. if only one of them get better, no matter which one, its still going to end up in monopoly.

DX12 performance is on par with Vulcan performance with only minor variations based on game tested, so its not really going to be a killer for Nvidia. Though the Win 10 exclusivity may play a big part in people not adopting DX12, especially if MS keeps pusshing its horrible windows store on games.

 

[Thurston]

Check available drivers, 364.51 is now released. I have installed it. I didn't have any problems with the previous version, and no current problems.

 

[TotalerKrieger]

Nvidia - Great hardware, software that makes you want to scream.

Amen to that!

However it is AMD that is the exact opposite: Hardware that makes you want to scream, great software.

AMD's software has improved a lot over the past few years, but still pales in comparison to Nvidia's abilities. I will say that since the release of Crimson, AMD's drivers have been excellent, no complaints thus far.

AMD hardware has used a far more intelligent, forward thinking architecture design for some time now, though until very recently you wouldn't really know it based on gaming performance benchmarks. The benefits of AMD's "long-game" gamble are only starting to pay off in DX12 games that use asynchronous compute, where their higher end cards appear to have jumped into the next highest priceerformance tier. Pretty damn impressive that a $425 R9 390x can keep up with and even outpace a $650 GTX 980 Ti.

A more complete list of card for Hitman benchmarks in DX12:
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Hitman-Spiel-6333/Specials/DirectX-12-Benchmark-Test-1188758/

Sucks that Nvidia is very close to 100% market share while AMD is crippled by debt. A monopoly will be bad news for all consumers regardless of preference. Hopefully, AMDs Polaris GPUs and Zen CPUs will put them back on the right track and breath some competition into the hardware market.

 

[Strazdas]

Beg to differ. In all my Nvidia PCs (well... a total of two) I have had more issues than with my R9 390 or old ATI 5770. At this point I think it is just a self-perpetuating myth and nothing more.

Those gamers are fucking morons. And I do mean it. With that being said, AMD cards dont have issues with games day one.

The next point is incorrect. Very often Nvidia sponsored games have AMD cards winning in all but the 980 Ti (one of only two good Nvidia cards) and Titan X. And those 2 cards are technically irrelevant. Hell, even the Fury Non X, the PoS 980 and Nano are technically irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. I know peeps at OCN dont like me for reminding them of that... but it is the truth. The 950, R9 370, 380, 390 (barely, it too is almost irrelevant due to its cost) and 970 are where the sales are at. Those matter.

Winning in the top end is great for marketing and for a small minority of people. It is otherwise irrelevant as those people are a minority and don't matter. Problem is the stupid thinking infects even lower end cards. Like buying the PoS GTX 960 instead of an R9 380 because... 980 TI > Fury X... thank God it is just a video card, else that level of logic should be illegal to the survival of humanity.

AMD's current DX12 results are expected. 390X matching Titan X.

http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Hitman-Spiel-6333/Specials/DirectX-12-Benchmark-Test-1188758/
Same for AoTS basically. That is why AMD's DX11 overhead is higher. The GPUs were built for Mantle/DX12/Vulkan.

http://ext3h.makegames.de/DX12_Compute.html

Yes I do hope AMD does better and does not bring out POS like Fiji. It is ironic that the 2013 Hawaii architecture and its refreshed Grenada are beating two generations of Nvidia high end GPUs* and matching the Titan X at DX12, but ... it also shows just how stupid Fiji and Fury are. Imbalanced design is bad.

If AMD goes down I will be forced to quit PC Gaming. Such is life.

*DX11 NFS:
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Need-for-Speed-2015-Spiel-55563/Specials/Benchmarks-Technik-Test-1188606/
http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/far-cry-primal-pc-graphics-performance-benchmark-review,1.html
FC Primal DX11
http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/the-division-pc-graphics-performance-benchmark-review,1.html
The Division... cause R9 290 > GTX 970 > 780 Ti. Good to know... on a Gimpvidea title ... *sigh* PC gamers are idiots... I am an idiot...

You had, as you admit, two Nvidia PCs. meanwhile im using information quoted by industry professionals that dealt with thousands. In this thread itself we have Kross claim the same.

Oh, AMD cards most definately do have issues with many games on day one releases. They usually patch it up with drivers in a few days or find a workaround, but its so frequent nowadays that there is a meme going around about new games being unplaying with AMD cards.

Also you do realize that those cards where you claim sales matters are usually a rebrand of last generation cards that "dont matter", right? Usually there are only 1 or 2 new flagship cards while the rest of series is rebrand with some tweaks. Without those "irrelevant" cards we wont have the relevant ones next year.

Also interesting think in those tests. Nvidia cards perform better on DX 11 than DX 12? that is contrary to all we saw before. Even if AMD is getting bigger boost from DX12, Nvidia does not go backwards. Something is fucked up in Hitman.

Also of course 970 > 780 ti. Like i told you before, there is much more in a GPU than raw power. Division and games like that utilize these new features in the 9XX gen like exessive tesselation with very little processing power, something older cards arent as capable of handling since they were never built with that in mind.

 

[Leg End]

And this is why consoles are popular ...

So, totally forget the PS4 bricking, the PS3 bricking, the 360s bricking and losing optical drive functionality and the long laundry list of the last two gens of consoles having issues after updates or just in general.

 

[deadish]

And this is why consoles are popular ...

So, totally forget the PS4 bricking, the PS3 bricking, the 360s bricking and losing optical drive functionality and the long laundry list of the last two gens of consoles having issues after updates or just in general.

When a console bricks, it's the manufacturer's fault. If it's under warranty, they will replace it - heck, even if it isn't under warranty they will probably have to fix it somehow or risk a class action lawsuit.

PC broken? Good luck. You are on your own. The fact that it could be one out of half a dozen parts that can be broken, and it's either the software drivers are bugged or the hardware is dead, doesn't help.

 

[Leg End]

When a console bricks, it's the manufacturer's fault. If it's under warranty, they will replace it - heck, even if it isn't under warranty they will probably have to fix it somehow or risk a class action lawsuit.

And yet I had two 360s have their optical drive fail under two different updates within two years of each other and I believe MS said they were not covered. Have a PS3 sitting in my living room with a dead optical drive. I /hadhave controllers laying about with analog sticks that don't work properly/at all and PS3 controllers seem to have a curse with me that they all stop working right at all within a year and a half of each other. None of these covered under warranty and Sony won't even attempt to fix my PS3 even if I pay them. They told me I should just buy another, and their newest model is a cheaply made piece of junk. Also the most recent PSN and presumably Xbox LIVE TOS has you sign away your right to file a class action against them.

Of course, you can likely tell them to eat shit in court but, issues.

PC broken? Good luck. You are on your own.

Parts have warranties as well.

The fact that it could be one out of half a dozen parts that can be broken, and it's either the software drivers are bugged or the hardware is dead, doesn't help.

I'll totally concede it can be a ***** determining what exactly a problem can be. Still no worse than consoles. Arguably better as you can pick quality components and not say, the terrible optical drives of console manufacturers.

 

[deadish]

I'll totally concede it can be a ***** determining what exactly a problem can be. Still no worse than consoles. Arguably better as you can pick quality components and not say, the terrible optical drives of console manufacturers.

It's worst than consoles. Most people you must understand have no idea what a CPU is.

With consoles, they just have it in their head that "my PS4 broke" and in the worst case drop $400 on a new one. No different from say their fridge breaking.

People just want things to "just work". You are greatly overestimating the number of people willing to get their hands dirty and troubleshoot an appliance that from their perspective might as well be powered by magic. They don't want the responsibility.

 

[Leg End]

It's worst than consoles. Most people you must understand have no idea what a CPU is.

If they're borderline braindead, sure.

With consoles, they just have it in their head that "my PS4 broke" and in the worst case drop $400 on a new one.

And that's why they're made so cheaply. People just buy another.

No different from say their fridge breaking.

You mean you don't contact someone who can examine the fridge and see what the problem may be?

People just want things to "just work". You are greatly overestimating the number of people willing to get their hands dirty and troubleshoot an appliance that from their perspective might as well be powered by magic. They don't want the responsibility.

And with it they get stupidly high failure rates, higher than PCs I'd argue. Kind of negates the point of buying a console if that's the reason.

 

[deadish]

If they're borderline braindead, sure.

OK ... You don't meet people outside your social circle much do you.

You mean you don't contact someone who can examine the fridge and see what the problem may be?

Maybe they do. I don't know if they have a local electronics repair place.

And with it they get stupidly high failure rates, higher than PCs I'd argue. Kind of negates the point of buying a console if that's the reason.

Who is this "they" you are referring to? The "they" I'm talking about are the consumers who buy consoles.

Console failure rates are inline with the rest of the electronics industry - except for outliners like the 360.