[SOLVED] Why do most drivers run badly (GTX 1060 6GB) ?

[AxolotlAxel]

Hello!,

So I was running into severe performance issues lately and it turns out that for some reason my GTX 1060 6gb didn't like the new drivers and going back to driver version 442.74 completely fixed "almost" all of my fps issues, so I was wondering what could be causing my GPU to run so badly with the latest drivers? I tried it on two separate installations of windows and in both cases it ran badly, I tried it on windows version 2004 and 20H2 and both ran really badly and only when I finally reverted to the older driver that It worked well again, so I'd like to ask why this happens, honestly at this point its more out of curiosity than anything, If it can be fixed that would be great but otherwise I'm fine using older drivers, I just would like to know why this is happening.. thank you for your time and assistance!

My PC Specs for reference:

Intel Core i7 8700K @4.8 Ghz (Max temp around 85c ish.. but usually doesn't get that high when gaming)
16 GB of DDR4 @3600 Mhz
GALAX GTX 1060 6GB EXOC with some overclock (Max temp 86 c)
128 GB SSD & 4 TB regular hard drives
XFX 600w XT PSU
MSI Z370 Gaming Plus motherboard

 

[MJS WARLORD]

Hi , their are many reasons why drivers can cause problem , i have a zotac gtx 1080 and just because a driver works ok on my card it does not mean that it will work on another branded version of the 1080.

A very long time ago you would not have got a driver for say the 1050 , 1060 , 1070 , 1080 , you would only have been able to get a driver that covered all the 10 series and thats when a lot of uses had problems. Way back then i had an aquarium screen saver and after a driver update if i got weird patterns on the screen when i ran the aquarium i knew i would have a problem with that particular driver during gaming.

TIP.... i always keep the last driver in my downloads folder just in case the next one causes me a problem.

 

[AxolotlAxel]

Ahh, the issue is a lot of the drivers don't work well on my gpu , isn't there anything I can do besides downloading a crap ton of them and trying them out one at a time? I remember being able to update just fine up until like 2 months ago and I don't remember the last stable newer driver I tried..

 

[BFG-9000]

If you want to be generous, then it's because optimization work is now focused on Turing and Ampere rather than the 2 generations older Pascal.

If you are cynical, then it's because their entire GameWorks SDK program for helping game developers make games intentionally adds strange pathways designed to only run fast when using unique features added to their newest cards, in order to hobble and cause issues for AMD cards--unfortunately this also hobbles their own older cards too because those also lack such special hardware, and the issues can get by the driver team because they aren't allotted much time or money to debug older cards that simply aren't generating profit any more.

After all the whole point of this program is to make their newest cards look like a huge upgrade over both older cards and the competition, so that gamers have to upgrade every two years if they want to play the latest AAA games. They aren't spending all that money to subsidize game development because they really want to help game publishers!

442.59 is currently the driver with highest DX11 performance with Pascal. It's about a year old so inadvisable to install GeForce Experience with it as that's what seems to have the most security vulnerabilities. I would install it using Wizzard's NVCleanstall just to avoid the older telemetry components that could also present an attack surface.

 

[AxolotlAxel]

I see, thank you very much for your help!, that really sucks tho, It would be nice if we could get decent driver updates, at the very least.. they shouldn't reduce our performance, sadly I can't really upgrade anytime soon so i'm stuck with this 1060 for a while.. i'll try out that program and that version of the Nvidia drivers as well.. thank you!

 

[AxolotlAxel]

After trying driver version 442.59 I can confirm that performance is spectacular, my fps in GTA 4 on max settings went from 40s outside Niko's house all the way up to 85-120 in some places, very very amazing experience so far, I'm trying out a bunch of other games but CSGO (max settings as well) ran fantastically well too with an average of 290-450 fps in a crowded deathmatch game which is usually where the fps is the lowest out of all the other game modes, I'll try out some more games and update this reply based on my findings but so far so good!, thank you very much for the recommendation.

GTA 5 - ran very well with 70-150 fps based on where I'm on the map with mostly high settings and grass on normal.