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How often do you upgrade your graphics card drivers?

I always install the latest driver whether it's the latest official release or beta. For me 99.9% of the time I just install over the top (no clean install) and I never have issues normally unless the fault is with nvidia breaking something in the driver like the broken PCSS shadows causing flickering a few drivers ago in the division and watch dogs 2. But it's extremely rare for me to have issues. If I have to downgrade to the previous driver then I just simply install the older version over the top of the new version, again it installs just fine.

Installing drivers these days is pretty much hassle free. Most of the time I don't even reboot after installing them over the top. Just boot up my game after installing and I have zero issue.

DDU just causes more problems than it fixes and I wouldn't go near it if you paid me. Tested it once to see what it was like and it pretty much broke windows, had to use a recovery point to get beck in.

If I have to resort to a clean driver install for any reason then the built in checkbox option for clean install works perfectly fine.
 
I use ddu when ever i have a driver problem. And it fixes it without needing to do a fresh install of windows. Afaik it just deletes all instances if amd entries in the registery so notjing is left behind just like it was never there like a fresh install of windows.
 
I only update when I feel the need - so e.g. a game is having problems or a game I play with poor performance is meant to have some performance fixes in a later version. Otherwise I can sit on one driver version for ages (if it ain't broke...)

For the upgrade I always download, do custom install -> clean. I've never had any need to use DDU including when switching between cards. I guess I might use it if something went horribly wrong - but more likely I'd just format as it doesn't take long and I'd rather avoid hacky system changes even if sometimes it seems to work out ok. I accept it can be useful to some people, but I cringe every time someone suggests using it as the first try approach.
 
Radeon85 said:
I always install the latest driver whether it's the latest official release or beta. For me 99.9% of the time I just install over the top (no clean install) and I never have issues normally unless the fault is with nvidia breaking something in the driver like the broken PCSS shadows causing flickering a few drivers ago in the division and watch dogs 2. But it's extremely rare for me to have issues. If I have to downgrade to the previous driver then I just simply install the older version over the top of the new version, again it installs just fine.
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It really is amazing how often things get broken in new drivers. I don't think AMD's or nVidia's testing process is thorough enough...either that or they don't care about certain features enough to worry that they're broken. People using CRU to extend their monitor's FreeSync range either have to use old AMD drivers (pre-17.2.1) or use a workaround script to disable and re-enable GPU Scaling in Radeon Settings every boot up. And let's not forget how many years nVidia's "colour range" option was either missing or totally broken...
 
Cromulent said:
Just to be on the safe side really. I've had driver problems in the past and it is a pain in the arse so I'd rather do it properly.
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It's only really needed when moving from AMD to Nvidia or vice versa. Latest drivers are designed to overwrite/supplement, what drivers you already have
 
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