GPU Drivers - Do they do anything?

[chivs688]

I've had my GTX 480 for about 2 years now, and every driver update has only seemed to have had performance increases for the 600 series. I've never seen anything about games performance increase for the 480.

Now I'm guessing that when the 400 series was the new top one, the drivers were geared towards that.
So my question is: do any of the drivers nowadays, that only list improvements to the 600 series cards, improve my 480 at all?

I'm guessing there are little things that they add to all cards, but I'm thinking more of where they show 10% performance increase for x game etc.

Thanks.

 

[Sin_Chase]

You have answered your own question.

 

[Deceptor]

I dare say some changes impact previous generations, but either nVidia don't wanna test the backlog of cards or the improvements aren't worth mentioning. More likely though they'll just omit/avoid any enhancements, obviously they want people to upgrade and there's no point if the older generations keep getting better with driver updates

 

[Rroff]

The driver notes for GeForce drivers only show typical gains, etc. usually with nVidia drivers you get updates for new game releases, various tweaks and fixes as well as other performance updates that trickle down to older cards... infact even to this day the G92 based cards are seeing some performance updates from newer drivers - generally nothing amazing but the odd 5% here, 2-3% there etc.

nVidia use a far more unified driver architecture than is typical tho and the same may not be so true for other brands.

 

[varkanoid]

best thing to do is benchmark with old then benchmark with new so you can see any improvements yourself.

 

[bru]

If you read the release notes for the drivers you will see that it does indeed tell you about improvements to 400 series cards

GeForce R310 Drivers:

Performance Boost – Increases performance for GeForce 400/500/600 Series GPUs in several PC games vs. GeForce 306.97 WHQL drivers. Results will vary depending on your GPU and system configuration:

but as Rroff said above the gains listed are typical ones not guaranteed for every card.

the latest driver thread can be found here

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18470288

 

[Kaapstad]

I dont know about the 400 series but my favorite drivers for the 500 and 600 series are 306.23

They give my GTX 590s a bit of a boost and my GTX 690s on 1 or 2 GPUs the best results, on 4 GPUs their not so good.