RogueSix wrote on Apr 29, 2025, 15:12:

Sepharo wrote on Apr 29, 2025, 14:08:

RogueSix wrote on Apr 29, 2025, 13:02:

Xero wrote on Apr 29, 2025, 10:40:
I'll admit, I've been with Nvidia forever. Literally went from 3DFX to Nvidia Geforce2. At that time, someone going from 3DFX to Nvidia would have been like going from Nvidia to AMD when AMD was having all kinds of driver issues. It was so bad, I took my Geforce2 out and put back the 3DFX card because it was more stable.

That's weird. Not sure what your issues were but I did the exact same thing. I upgraded in the year 2000 from dual Creative Voodoo 2s (SLI) to a Hercules GeForce 2 GTS card and never looked back. It was a great card that performed very well at the time thanks to hardware T&L which was, literally, a game changer compared to ye olde Voodoos.
I had no complaints and have fond memories of the Hercules GeForce 2 GTS. Awesome card and coupled with an Athlon 800MHz it let me play pretty much all of the games back then in full glory (e.g. Gothic 1 which was really demanding when it was released in March 2001). Nothing but good memories...

Not really part of the driver stability discussion maybe... But, from that same time period I recall GeForce enabling one to play games with newer technology, such as Morrowind, but performing much worse on Half-Life and its mods. So like Xero, I remember friends that ended up switching back to their 3DFX cards because we were primarily playing CS and HL mods at the time.

I don't remember that at all and I played CS from Beta 7 onward (I started CS in the year 2001). Maybe it was other HL-based mods and maybe it was more a problem with the mods than nVidia drivers.
nVidia was always great with OpenGL-based games like Quake 3A which was all the rage at the time. And, as we old schoolers will remember, Source is effectively a fork of the Quake engine so there was no reason why nVidia shouldn't be tripping on Source-based stuff.

What can I say? Personally, I had zero issues with CS Beta 7 except for skill issues (but that got better with time and practice!).

It was definitely a thing... 3DFX outperformed on the HL engine (not Source which came later, but retroactively it was named GoldSrc) for like two generations. Wasn't specific to any one mod. It was because of tight coupling with Glide.

Slick wrote on Apr 28, 2025, 22:41:

phinn wrote on Apr 28, 2025, 21:02:
Nvidia drivers are rock solid don't know what you babbling about. Sure RTX 50 series launched in a a bit of a mess but things are cleaned up now, not like AMD is a stranger to that with how many AGESA and chipset driver fixes I've applied to my Ryzen over the years. My 4070 has been nearly flawless for 2 years.

No one is talking about CPUs. Nice strawman argument tho.

You might want to look up straw man argument you don’t know what it means. I directly responded to your hyperbolic comment with my experience that they’re generally high very quality drivers over the years. In fact I’ve had almost no issues over 3-4 GPU upgrades all Nvidia. That is not a straw man. I added that no one is immune to bugs AMD included with so many minor CPU fixes I’ve had to update for. Do you post anything constructive here or just troll?

Sepharo wrote on Apr 29, 2025, 14:08:

RogueSix wrote on Apr 29, 2025, 13:02:

Xero wrote on Apr 29, 2025, 10:40:
I'll admit, I've been with Nvidia forever. Literally went from 3DFX to Nvidia Geforce2. At that time, someone going from 3DFX to Nvidia would have been like going from Nvidia to AMD when AMD was having all kinds of driver issues. It was so bad, I took my Geforce2 out and put back the 3DFX card because it was more stable.

That's weird. Not sure what your issues were but I did the exact same thing. I upgraded in the year 2000 from dual Creative Voodoo 2s (SLI) to a Hercules GeForce 2 GTS card and never looked back. It was a great card that performed very well at the time thanks to hardware T&L which was, literally, a game changer compared to ye olde Voodoos.
I had no complaints and have fond memories of the Hercules GeForce 2 GTS. Awesome card and coupled with an Athlon 800MHz it let me play pretty much all of the games back then in full glory (e.g. Gothic 1 which was really demanding when it was released in March 2001). Nothing but good memories...

Not really part of the driver stability discussion maybe... But, from that same time period I recall GeForce enabling one to play games with newer technology, such as Morrowind, but performing much worse on Half-Life and its mods. So like Xero, I remember friends that ended up switching back to their 3DFX cards because we were primarily playing CS and HL mods at the time.

I don't remember that at all and I played CS from Beta 7 onward (I started CS in the year 2001). Maybe it was other HL-based mods and maybe it was more a problem with the mods than nVidia drivers.
nVidia was always great with OpenGL-based games like Quake 3A which was all the rage at the time. And, as we old schoolers will remember, Source is effectively a fork of the Quake engine so there was no reason why nVidia shouldn't be tripping on Source-based stuff.

What can I say? Personally, I had zero issues with CS Beta 7 except for skill issues (but that got better with time and practice!).

RogueSix wrote on Apr 29, 2025, 13:02:

Xero wrote on Apr 29, 2025, 10:40:
I'll admit, I've been with Nvidia forever. Literally went from 3DFX to Nvidia Geforce2. At that time, someone going from 3DFX to Nvidia would have been like going from Nvidia to AMD when AMD was having all kinds of driver issues. It was so bad, I took my Geforce2 out and put back the 3DFX card because it was more stable.

That's weird. Not sure what your issues were but I did the exact same thing. I upgraded in the year 2000 from dual Creative Voodoo 2s (SLI) to a Hercules GeForce 2 GTS card and never looked back. It was a great card that performed very well at the time thanks to hardware T&L which was, literally, a game changer compared to ye olde Voodoos.
I had no complaints and have fond memories of the Hercules GeForce 2 GTS. Awesome card and coupled with an Athlon 800MHz it let me play pretty much all of the games back then in full glory (e.g. Gothic 1 which was really demanding when it was released in March 2001). Nothing but good memories...

Not really part of the driver stability discussion maybe... But, from that same time period I recall GeForce enabling one to play games with newer technology, such as Morrowind, but performing much worse on Half-Life and its mods. So like Xero, I remember friends that ended up switching back to their 3DFX cards because we were primarily playing CS and HL mods at the time.

Xero wrote on Apr 29, 2025, 10:40:
I'll admit, I've been with Nvidia forever. Literally went from 3DFX to Nvidia Geforce2. At that time, someone going from 3DFX to Nvidia would have been like going from Nvidia to AMD when AMD was having all kinds of driver issues. It was so bad, I took my Geforce2 out and put back the 3DFX card because it was more stable.

That's weird. Not sure what your issues were but I did the exact same thing. I upgraded in the year 2000 from dual Creative Voodoo 2s (SLI) to a Hercules GeForce 2 GTS card and never looked back. It was a great card that performed very well at the time thanks to hardware T&L which was, literally, a game changer compared to ye olde Voodoos.
I had no complaints and have fond memories of the Hercules GeForce 2 GTS. Awesome card and coupled with an Athlon 800MHz it let me play pretty much all of the games back then in full glory (e.g. Gothic 1 which was really demanding when it was released in March 2001). Nothing but good memories...

I think one of the benefits of my always buying my gfx card right before a new gen comes out is that I don't usually have to deal with all this stuff. The bugs that require hotfixes are usually with whatever the latest greatest series/card is, and thus it misses me for the most part. Am I doing this intentionally, and because I am a smart little nerd? No, just cheap.

Last 12 months, number of driver releases (including beta and hot fixes):

GeForce = 21
Radeon = 13
Arc = 43

Arc users wish more games were less broken, and Radeon users wish there were more frequent updates.
I don't think GeForce users should be complaining (about drivers).
There have never been more games, or more GeForce architectures, or more GeForce-only features.
Save your strength for the fight against 8GB 6060 Ti

I'll admit, I've been with Nvidia forever. Literally went from 3DFX to Nvidia Geforce2. At that time, someone going from 3DFX to Nvidia would have been like going from Nvidia to AMD when AMD was having all kinds of driver issues. It was so bad, I took my Geforce2 out and put back the 3DFX card because it was more stable.

Fast forward to Nvidia getting better with their drivers and I went through many Nvidia cards. I'll typically install a driver if I'm aware a new one came out. At this point, I think they're mostly pretty stable unless you're looking at every FPS or playing all the latest and greatest and obviously they're trying to fine tune their drivers for those titles. I can't recall a driver explicitly ruining my gaming experience from Nvidia in the last decade or so. At least as far back as I can remember buying their hardware as of late on my newer builds.

I'm not saying they're perfect and I'm sure folks have issues with them, but they may be in a small percentile depending on their entire hardware profile and how it all comes together. Additionally, having other softwares running in the background, etc.

G.oZ wrote on Apr 29, 2025, 05:05:

VaranDragon wrote on Apr 29, 2025, 02:17:
I haven't downloaded a new nvidia driver since before they released 5XXXX. No issues whatsoever with my 3090RTX.

I know that there are, and have been, regular reports of problems with drivers for years ... but I'm just wondering who regularly encounters them? Are these people who download every new driver? Are they just unlucky, do they have masses of software bloat, do they run through 20-30+ games a month (far more likely to hit issues), or niche products, non-standard monitor/hardware configs?

I essentially don't get game stability or video glitching issues, and can't remember any regular issues with drivers in recent memory. (10 years). I think I remember one game a couple years ago that had an update that caused an issue - but that was a game issue. I rarely update my driver - perhaps once every few months. Sometimes a game will prompt me to upgrade (eg PoE2 beta).

As I said, I update very frequently and usually immediately on the day of release (almost) every single driver/hotfix version and my experience has been as near flawless as yours. One rollback several years ago. That was it.

As for experiencing issues, I guess it is just a matter of scale. There are sooo many possible combinations. People on ancient operating systems (Win 7/Win 10), ancient graphics hardware from 10 years ago and all sorts of hardware/software combinations that can cause issues. nVidia had over 90% market share in dGPU until recently. That's one helluva lot of cards, systems, hardware and software combos out there across the desktop and mobile (laptop) segments.

With very rare exceptions, I usually don't even know what the driver update notes are talking about as I have personally never experienced the issue(s) described in there (i.e. the ones not related to specific gens or games).

At the end of the day, an AMD fanboi like Slick sees a long list of fixes and throws a toddler tantrum because he's salty that AMD's role in the dGPU market has degraded to the level of insignificance. That's all there is to it. The usual haters just draw their agenda-filled conclusions from the update notes while those of us with actual practical experience simply enjoy our awesome nVidia hardware and games .

G.oZ wrote on Apr 29, 2025, 05:05:

VaranDragon wrote on Apr 29, 2025, 02:17:
I haven't downloaded a new nvidia driver since before they released 5XXXX. No issues whatsoever with my 3090RTX.

I know that there are, and have been, regular reports of problems with drivers for years ... but I'm just wondering who regularly encounters them? Are these people who download every new driver? Are they just unlucky, do they have masses of software bloat, do they run through 20-30+ games a month (far more likely to hit issues), or niche products, non-standard monitor/hardware configs?

I essentially don't get game stability or video glitching issues, and can't remember any regular issues with drivers in recent memory. (10 years). I think I remember one game a couple years ago that had an update that caused an issue - but that was a game issue. I rarely update my driver - perhaps once every few months. Sometimes a game will prompt me to upgrade (eg PoE2 beta). Any display/visual shenanigans I've had are usually related to VR or AVR(amp) output. I don't play that many games, but "update driver to fix game issue" is essentially less than once in a blue moon for me.

I do remember the *fun* with 3Dfx and glide, and competing standards, and then trying to get glide to run on nVidia stuff.

It's worth it if you have a "current gen" graphics card. Since it's new hardware, you need software to drive it and it takes a while for the software to mature, and usually there are fixes, some graphical improvements and stability issues that are solved by regularly updating your graphics drivers. So there is merit to it, but with one caveat. As soon as your card is no longer "current gen" I don't believe it's really worth downloading new drivers, unless you are having issues with your current ones. You will probably get more grief if you keep doing that.

VaranDragon wrote on Apr 29, 2025, 02:17:
I haven't downloaded a new nvidia driver since before they released 5XXXX. No issues whatsoever with my 3090RTX.

I know that there are, and have been, regular reports of problems with drivers for years ... but I'm just wondering who regularly encounters them? Are these people who download every new driver? Are they just unlucky, do they have masses of software bloat, do they run through 20-30+ games a month (far more likely to hit issues), or niche products, non-standard monitor/hardware configs?

I essentially don't get game stability or video glitching issues, and can't remember any regular issues with drivers in recent memory. (10 years). I think I remember one game a couple years ago that had an update that caused an issue - but that was a game issue. I rarely update my driver - perhaps once every few months. Sometimes a game will prompt me to upgrade (eg PoE2 beta). Any display/visual shenanigans I've had are usually related to VR or AVR(amp) output. I don't play that many games, but "update driver to fix game issue" is essentially less than once in a blue moon for me.

I do remember the *fun* with 3Dfx and glide, and competing standards, and then trying to get glide to run on nVidia stuff.

I haven't downloaded a new nvidia driver since before they released 5XXXX. No issues whatsoever with my 3090RTX.

I am glad that I do not have to worry about this bullshit anymore. System gets an update, I get a new version of mesa, and I put out zero effort and don't have to track shit.

I think I can guess who is owning nvidAI shares.

phinn wrote on Apr 28, 2025, 21:02:
Nvidia drivers are rock solid don't know what you babbling about. Sure RTX 50 series launched in a a bit of a mess but things are cleaned up now, not like AMD is a stranger to that with how many AGESA and chipset driver fixes I've applied to my Ryzen over the years. My 4070 has been nearly flawless for 2 years.

No one is talking about CPUs. Nice strawman argument tho.

LOL if you think Nvidia drivers are rock solid, you're living in a fantasy land. They've been just as hit or miss as anything else for over a decade.

AMD used to be a laughing stock, but then they caught up, but the damage to their image had already been done, and now that's just what people think in perpetuity.

Nvidia drivers have never been as broken as they are since the 5xxx launch, I'll grant that, but this idea that they've been "rock solid" is a fantasy. There are many games where I got performance decreases after updating to the latest nvidia driver. If your only criteria is "doesn't crash" then I'm sorry, but you just haven't been paying attention.

By the way, have any of your nvidia fanbois actually tried an AMD card in the last decade? Didn't think so.

I'd rather have GeForce drivers every week, than NO hot fixes or beta drivers from Radeon for 6 weeks

Slick wrote on Apr 28, 2025, 20:20:
What a shitshow. Nvidia drivers have been a crapshoot for over a decade. In that same decade AMD's have been pretty darn stable. And yet, ask a gamer who makes the most stable gaming drivers...

I can say with a straight face that I have barely had any issues with nVidia drivers in the last decade (actually two and a half decades because I switched from 3Dfx to nVidia in the year 2000 and never bought another brand since then). I had to roll back a driver maybe once or twice but that was years ago and I can't even remember the specifics anymore. There are very rare occasions when there is an issue with a specific game.

A "recent" (sort of) example would be Immortals Fenyx Rising. That one was unstable (crashed to desktop) with all drivers after a certain version number but nVidia fixed it after a few weeks. It was easy enough to just stay on the old version while playing Fenyx.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head. I update to nearly every single driver version almost immediately. I always read the list of fixes and it is extremely rare that I even experienced one of the fixed issues. A lot of those errors only occur under very specific circumstances or are super-rare to begin with.

I don't own a RTX 5000 card but I would bet it is very similar for many people. The vast majority of RTX 5000 owners have probably never experienced any of the issues listed in the update notes.

For me personally (RTX 4090), 576.02 worked just as fine as 576.15 and now 576.26 is also going strong so far (granted, it's only been a few hours ). For the record, I always do a clean-install and a manual slim install without the bloat. I do not use the nVidia app and I only have a single monitor (4K), no SLI, no VR, no "special" use cases which might increase the risk of running into issues.

Given the complexity of the drivers, nVidia has a flawless record for me personally. The minor issues I have experienced over the years have all been few and far between. nVidia has usually also been rather quick to address the issue in question. Even with older games, it usually only takes them a month or two to release a fix. Their support is pretty damn impressive. I will keep buying nVidia until I croak .

Nvidia drivers are rock solid don't know what you babbling about. Sure RTX 50 series launched in a a bit of a mess but things are cleaned up now, not like AMD is a stranger to that with how many AGESA and chipset driver fixes I've applied to my Ryzen over the years. My 4070 has been nearly flawless for 2 years.

What a shitshow. Nvidia drivers have been a crapshoot for over a decade. In that same decade AMD's have been pretty darn stable. And yet, ask a gamer who makes the most stable gaming drivers...