can a bad driver cause graphic artifacting. quick question...

i picked up a 1070 founders edition a few months ago to replace my 970. has been working great at everything i throw at it.

it is at stock clocks. and the temps are always fine and well cooled .

i installed the latest nvidia driver 2 days ago and all seemed well. i played hours of final fantasy 14 and wow on max settings at a stable 60fps with vsync on (hate screen tear).

temps were still good. but when i loaded up dc universe online. i got some triangle white shapped artifacting,

i realized i just installed the driver 2 days prior and havent played the game since i installed it. so i went to reinstall the driver.

no more artifacting now. which makes me wonder. can a bad driver install cause artifacting? would like to confirm for sure.

thank you for ur time

 

I will also note that dcuo is a 8 year old game so maybe it could be bad coding as well. forgot to mention i also ran a repair on the game client well the drivers were reinstalling

 

Yes.

 

Potentially yes. However check if issues do not occur in other games.

First of all run all key benchmarks and push your card in terms of temps - if there will be no issues then most likely its modern drivers/card not working well with the old game.

 

i played around 8 hours of wow this evening with no issues, as well as around 2 hours of the game in question without issues as well. also ran black desert online for about an hour (my most demanding game) to see if that would trigger it. nothing happened tho guessing it was a bad driver install. i havent used DDU in awhile so maybe old files were causing issues? ive been installing the drivers thru the geforce app and only using ddu if i run into issues (which this has been the first sinse ive gotten the card).

 

DDU is a fantastic tool to delete/ reinstall drivers regardless of you having issues or not having them. I use it mandatory on every new driver, and would advise you to do the same.

 

Yes; mostly on old out-dated titles though.

If it's just a single game and no others it may be that.

 

Of course it can.

 

Ditto.

Also faster to uninstall with DDU than with default uninstaller if you have multiple driver components installed (nvidia).

Just reboot to safe mode, run DDU, reboot to normal mode, install new driver. Neat!

Never had any issues with DDU.
It's also basically mandatory for W10 Home users to prevent Windows auto-reinstalling drivers upon reboot after uninstalling drivers (unless you do a registry tweak to stop it).

As for the topic question, bad driver or driver install can cause graphics glitches for sure.

 

Your thread title asks a different question.

 

drivers can, i seen it happen 1 game but not others, and reverting driver fixed.

Like other have said us DDU it makes sure there is no old drivers or files from old drivers installed, been doing this for years and before ddu was around I using driver sweeper and never had issue with any of those tool cause system issue.

 

I think one elaboration is needed here:

Yes, a certain driver release can of course cause all sorts of artifacting in games, especially since old games won't be re-tested by the driver-team (either by AMD nor NVidia, until problem reports come in). We've repeatedly seen this happen from both companies over the years (AMD example -- Planetary Annihilation fog artifacts). In jist, the drivers are massive, and as a project grows in size believe me it's damn hard to not break things with any little-change.

(a developer can only fit so much code conceptually in their brain at once, this gets increasingly hard for most people past 50k LOC onward -- I hate using LOC as a metric, but I'm trying to drive the point across here that display drivers are over 20-folds that size)


However while possible for drivers to be to blame ... (and this the important part), newer drivers can also relieve bottlenecks (reduce driver overhead, change timings [such as with power-management], etc), which can in turn mean the hardware is effectively being "pushed harder". Optimizations can cause instability, especially in demanding games, and even push a card to where it was factory-stable (at the time on a certain driver-release) and no longer is. If that happens then it doesn't necessarily mean the driver is "bad" persay .. rather it may just be that your card has never been pushed to its breaking point before.

EDIT: Also, yes remnants of drivers can cause problems too.
Sometimes registry values are altered, and or aren't set from a newer release (and also aren't cleaned by the update). DDU is an awesome tool.

 

yes for exemple i dont instal drivers right when they are out and maybe i never upgrade couse for my gpu i dont need that but now only one thing its bothering me while booting into Windows the sound driver its not loaded and gta5 crashing each 5 minutes.and sorry for my crapy english.