New Nividia Game Ready Drivers...should I...

[Blitzen]

I get alerts  from Nvidia every few months that a new "Game Ready Driver" is ready to download & install which I regularly do, but this morning after reading some of the small print regarding the newest one, I wondered if any of these really apply to GB or CloD and if perhaps one or another may be doing more harm than good. Does anyone have definite information on this topic.Has anyone figured out if there was one driver that was  the best for our flight sims or if it makes no difference at all? Thanks!

[Zeev]

The latest Nvidia driver introduces support for Call of Duty Black Ops (yet another) Cold War beta and support for Nvidia Reflex, which gives the developers option to reduce system latency. Currently only Apex Legends, Fortnite and Valorant uses this feature (based on an article from last month). I guess its the latency between your action and until you see the result on your monitor. But monitors also have their latency, so if anyone have more information on this please let me know.

 

About your question,  current newest Nvidia driver does not improve anything besides what mentioned above, so no effect on IL2 Great Battles I assume.

Should you update your drivers? Usually I and most of other users will tell you "Yes", and there are even some games that wont run or show you a warning if your drivers are old. But there are cases where older drivers provide more FPS in certain games.

 

I would suggest to keep your all drivers up to date because usually Quality Assurance do not bother testing their games on systems with older drivers.

Edited October 8, 2020 by Zeev

[dburne]

I myself always update to the latest drivers.

Have not had a problem doing so.

[DD_Arthur]

1 hour ago, dburne said:

I myself always update to the latest drivers.

Have not had a problem doing so.

Agree.

[jollyjack]

On 10/8/2020 at 7:49 PM, dburne said:

I myself always update to the latest drivers.

Have not had a problem doing so.

 

With my former AMD GPU i had better results with older drivers ...

[kestrel79]

I'm on older Nvidia drivers too. I usually don't update unless I run into issues or if others report significant fps increases in the games I play with the latest drivers...which usually isn't the case with flight sims since we are such a small niche market.

[56RAF_Roblex]

I tend to update eventually but there is always this nagging voice that says 'If the driver has been made more complicated to cope with things I will never need to do then is it impacting how fast it handles the core functionality?'     Imagine if 1C gave you an option to update all your aircraft to include chaff and flare dispensers and Ant-Radar missiles.  That is fine if you are flying modern jets but in IL2 you would not say 'OK. I wont need them but if it is free then why not?'  You would say 'No thanks. It is adding extra weight for threats I will never have to counter.'    I would hope that what actually happens is that the driver looks at your PC and the game on startup  and totally bypasses all the unneeded code and never checks again during that session but I worry that it constantly checks to see if you can use  Reflex etc.

Edited October 15, 2020 by 56RAF_Roblex

[RedKestrel]

6 minutes ago, 56RAF_Roblex said:

I tend to update eventually but there is always this nagging voice that says 'If the driver has been made more complicated to cope with things I will never need to do then is it impacting how fast it handles the core functionality?'     Imagine if 1C gave you an option to update all your aircraft to include chaff and flare dispensers and Ant-Radar missiles.  That is fine if you are flying modern jets but in IL2 you would not say 'OK. I wont need them but if it is free then why not?'  You would say 'No thanks. It is adding extra weight for threats I will never have to counter.'

As long as I have no problems, I don't update my GPU driver. If I have problems, its the first thing I update. I've seen too many issues start with "I just updated my GPU drivers and now I get ________ problem".

 

As a downside maybe I miss out on any optimization or performance increases that may come along with new drivers. But if everything is still running smoothly with no artifacts, then I probably don't notice anyway. 

[BOO]

I'll update every few months to see and google fu the interweb to see how a driver has been received but I tend to have a copy of the last one that worked well over a sufficient period of time to appreciate (436.48 in the case of my 1080) on standby. Before that its was a 425 driver. Buts its marginal TBH.

 

Some drivers are real dogs but are usually dogs in everything though. Few and far between.

 

Id say that the closer you are to running the current gen of GPU the less reason you have for not updating.