[SOLVED] What happens when a GPU manufacturer stops releasing new drivers for a specific generation?

[Shalou]

Hello everyone. I'm planning to buy an old HD 5850, but since it's drivers got cut releasing a really long time ago, I wonder if there are any actual downsides.

 

[USAFRet]

It just means that there are no new changes.
It does NOT mean that the thing no longer works.

 

[Shalou]

It just means that there are no new changes.
It does NOT mean that the thing no longer works.

I know that it doesn't mean it will no longer work. What I am asking is: Will there be any downsides? Downsides on temperature, downsides FPS, etc.

 

[USAFRet]

I know that it doesn't mean it will no longer work. What I am asking is: Will there be any downsides? Downsides on temperature, downsides FPS, etc.

No.

It will run exactly as good as it does the day the last update was released.

 

[sizzling]

I know that it doesn't mean it will no longer work. What I am asking is: Will there be any downsides? Downsides on temperature, downsides FPS, etc.

I’d say the main issue is not reaching the full potential of the card in games released after the last driver. New drivers are often tuning performance for new games or fine tuning performance for older games, obviously this will no longer happen.

 

[Shalou]

I’d say the main issue is not reaching the full potential of the card in games released after the last driver. New drivers are often tuning performance for new games or fine tuning performance for older games, obviously this will no longer happen.

I came back to write about this. Newer games perform worse because of the older drivers that cannot utilize full potential of the graphics card.

 

[kanewolf]

I came back to write about this. Newer games perform worse because of the older drivers that cannot utilize full potential of the graphics card.

Maybe. Maybe not. Graphics driver updates sometimes lower performance on game "A" to boost it on "B". Since you don't play "B", there is no benefit in you updating. Updating drivers "just because there are newer ones", isn't a great idea.

 

[Dean0919]

I know that it doesn't mean it will no longer work. What I am asking is: Will there be any downsides? Downsides on temperature, downsides FPS, etc.

No. This makes no sense. How there can be downsides of temperature or FPS if card wasn't having those issues? It's really not that hard to understand, but I'll make it as simple as possible for you: If right now card has let's say 70 degrees in a specific game and let's say 60 fps, it will remain like this if manufacturer doesn't release new drivers. It won't drop fps magically out of nothing all the sudden. And as already it was said, usually new drivers slightly boost performance of SOME new released games, that's it.

From my experience, I'll say this: I've been always updating my card drivers whenver they release new version, but in my practice, in the games I usually play, never I noticed any boost in performance in those games. It even usually says on a new driver release that in this version of driver they are optimizing "X" game for a better performance. So, you might get slightly better performance in one or two new games and that's it.

 

[digitalgriffin]

Hello everyone. I'm planning to buy an old HD 5850, but since it's drivers got cut releasing a really long time ago, I wonder if there are any actual downsides.

It means there are:

1. No bug fixes for broken games. It's up to the game dev to alter code for crashes.
2. No Optimization for specific games. Optimization often happens by keeping specific shader programs and textures in GPU memory
3. No security fixes or bug fixes.
4. Sometimes no support for future windows versions. (It's up to the OS vendor to create a driver often and it might be very rudimentary support)

I notice there's a trend in steam where windows releases a new version and Nvidia no longer supports it. It will be interesting to watch when Nvidia no longer supports pascal in 3-4 years and windows 12 is released.