Old nvidia driver running new games

Currently running 472.12 driver on GTX1660S. I'm relieve that latest titles release after this driver
like The Diofield Chronicle and a few i did not keep track run fine. Even the latest switch and 3DS emulator
like Citira, yuzu and Ryujinx on vulken as well. I wonder if driver older and better than mine does so or even better ? Anyone care to share some tips ?

 

Hi!
I have GTX 1660S too and I'm using 528.02 driver without any problems.

 

528.33 here 1066. Normal flight. All NVP functions work stably.

 

Or you can update to the latest driver, enjoy the same or better performance, with bug and security fixes on top of that

 

Apparently 512.95 was pretty good, so if you don't like running the absolute latest, upgrade to that instead.

 

I've tested newest drivers, but the best version for me it's just 528.02 - smooth and more FPS

 

The only downside to not running latest drivers is it will "probably" have lesser performance in games, miss modern game profiles, miss modern "features" (VSR), forced to use them in games like Battlefield and not have security vulnerability fixes.

But for me these modern drivers are just trash tier garbage since 512.95 because after that it introduced higher DPC latency which for me causes audio issues. As for Battlefield 2042, DICE haven't made a decent game since BF4 so I'm not forced to change.

 

Is there some benchmark comparison table somewhere? Or is this just based on some anecdote?

 

Anecdote.

 

Of course new driver new features support, but too much new features overload the gpu and eventually players would want to upgrade gpu. Hoping to keep a balance.

And security vulnerability fix is not important to me.

 

497.09 are the best performing drivers for me to date. Highest gaming scores and benchmarks.

 

You will miss out on game specific optimizations but unless the driver or game is bugged in some way it should still run, that is the point of hardware abstraction after all.

 

if you dont have specific bugs or perf issue in game you dont need latest/new driver
but driver its not only perf, bug focusing, security improvment its almost in all new drivers

 

For your GTX 980?

 

Yes.

 

If you have older video card, that may not even get driver updates, you still can play newest games(as long as hardware can run it). Drivers come in packages that feature individual drivers for many video cards and not all of them may be affected by the update. So as long as everything is working, you don't need to necessarily update your drivers every time an update is released.

 

• If a driver either fix or break a game it mean the developer should be less dependent on the breaking feature.
• Usually a driver can add, remove or limit and increase the requirement for a certain driver feature set, be it API or runtime.
• A driver profile could change the application behavior, some driver could expose more deprecated setting or use newer flag not available in the older and it's always better to rely on nvidia for the game ready specified profile.

Lately nvidia increased the minimum requirement for the driver version to get DLSS to work trough their streamline on any DLSS supported hardware.
So, if for a reason or another you are on older driver the feature might not display or be available but if handled correctly it should give no issue.
For that matter you could always OPT to use FSR2 which depending by the implementation could work just fine or eventually it should be still possible to use the 2.4.0 DLSS along the older streamline 1.1.1.

This is anyway subject to change and depend by a wild combination of factor, hardware and general knowledge.

 

Good "new" driver would be 512.95, most stable, oldest driver i know that works really well is 446.14. But for any new games and running them with unsupported drivers always degrades performance or can lead to weird in-game bugs and glitches. You have a 1660 Super, a relatively new and strong card, you don't need to do that weird sh*t of using some old drivers for the "better performance". Just stick to the newest driver that your games need, in my case it's 516.94 and call it a day. If a newer game comes and needs a more recent driver, update to that.

 

Driver updates fix bugs but also introduce new ones. You imply the most up-to-date driver is the optimal choice for all users but that simply isn't true. Depending on a user's choice of games and which bugs actually bother them vs which bugs are easily ignored or unnoticeable, an older driver might provide a better experience for that user.

I always advise people against updating blindly. Read the changelog carefully, even if you want to update don't do it straight away, wait and see if there are any horror stories first. These things are common sense. Updating without reading the changelog simply because the auto-updater told you an update is available is foolishness and asking for trouble. Look at all the horror stories around windows OS updates that broke things.

It's even more important to be cautious when updating if the updates cannot be rolled back. At least with GPU drivers you can DDU and install whatever version you like at any time, so nothing is permanent.

 

By the way, I'm starting to noticing that new games releases (2023) or older games with their (2023) update are breaking the previous card generation launch feature like DLSS and RTX with driver and incompatibility pushes.

Cyberpunk 2077 for example broke DLSS on 1.61 for any driver lower than 512 releases and now version 1.62 broke RTX on driver 472.
Even if you force load DLSS 2.4.6 now on driver 472 there buffer\lights artifacts appearing around specific material like glasses.
RT on 1.62 just crashes on the RTX 2080TI.

So, it appear that nvidia is breaking the driver compatibility with their new skimmed SDK for RTX and DLSS.
In practice if a released game get updated with those new SDK that nvidia provide, as it is (EG: without developer customization) the game might become not be well compatible with the older RTX series even if a new driver release is used.
New game releases are also becoming problematic since the performance you might get now with their proprietary feature on RTX series might not matter past the assurance and treatment that nvidia is temporally giving via driver to their top of the line product.

Luckily mine 980TI and 1080TI cannot be leveraged to crash via RTX feature and I will not visit nvidia direct http link on those system LOL!


That's not even planned obsolesce. It's literally making obsolete the hardware by adding bit of software incompatibility on feature already sold in the price tag.