Bradley wrote on May 18, 2015, 10:50:nin wrote on May 18, 2015, 08:52:
Anyhow, I fail to understand how new set of drivers could have anything to do with "marketing", please enlighten me.
Presumably they could be releasing a new driver that is unchanged from the previous driver to make it look like they are responsive to new games and are actively working on providing great support. The placebo effect and relative difficulty in actually quantifying graphical improvements will make people think that Nvidia is "The Bomb" or whatever you young people are saying these days.
The first lesson is: Nearly every game ships broken. We're talking major AAA titles from vendors who are everyday names in the industry. In some cases, we're talking about blatant violations of API rules - one D3D9 game never even called BeginFrame/EndFrame. Some are mistakes or oversights - one shipped bad shaders that heavily impacted performance on NV drivers. These things were day to day occurrences that went into a bug tracker. Then somebody would go in, find out what the game screwed up, and patch the driver to deal with it. There are lots of optional patches already in the driver that are simply toggled on or off as per-game settings, and then hacks that are more specific to games - up to and including total replacement of the shipping shaders with custom versions by the driver team. Ever wondered why nearly every major game release is accompanied by a matching driver release from AMD and/or NVIDIA? There you go.