Nvidia "Game Ready" drivers... pure marketing or 'real'?

This was also posted as two comments on the social network 'Playfire'. It is an 'opinion' as much as it is speculative. I don't work for any graphic chip company.

Nvidia "Game Ready" drivers...

... have mostly become a marketing tool for Nvidia to make you 'update', while prob. 90% of all cards get no driver update or 'optimization' whatsoever?

I do not know how ATI/AMD is doing these days, but I see Nvidia, using new flashy game releases, to push another round of useless nonsense once again on your harddrives, just to make you not forget their message: "(Your) new game = Nvidia's got your back".

Most 'updates' these days are Geforce Experience Profiles, Nvidia Shield and/or SLI related issues. Most recently VR API support. I can live without those 'updates'. "Use the latest driver" was a standard answer when something didn't work right. With some games "use a previous driver" has become a new answer in the game support forums.

GAMEWORKS™ - GAME WORKS?

Don't get me wrong. Nvidia (AND AMD) are still working with game publishers and developers on specific games. Always did. There STILL ARE per-game specific driver (tweaks) being released. But not with every new big game (as it used to be in 1999 = specific drivers for specific cards).

What is quite evident, is that Nvidia moved on to their 900 series cards and doesn't care about the rest anymore. But 'the rest' is what most people still have out there?!

The success of the 980/970 this year and the recent 960s turned the 'driver' carousel around. These days the 'latest cards' have the most 'mature' drivers (if they work or not is another question). Used to be the other way around.

Aside from the obvious Batman Arkham Knight, I still have to see evidence of 'real', different driver code when promoted games come out (from MGS V, to GTA V, Mad Max, AC Syndicate to Battlefront). I'd say, none of these games needed a 'new driver'. They run just fine on previous versions.

And Nvidia's free API (Gameworks/APEX Framework incl PhysX and now VR) is like DirectX. API doesn't change with every game.

Marketing has really taken over the update cycle. That is my point.

AMD made 200 series cards look like they're weaker in *benchmarks* when 300 series came out (up until 15.7 drivers) if that makes him feel better. So technically we weren't getting the performance we were suppose to get while R9 390 & R9 390X were. Marketing thing........

Both companies are gonna keep doing that to sell their shit. it's not 1999 anymore... lol.

Been using Nvidia for ever and update my drivers with every new game purchase because why wouldn't I want the latest driver unless it's broken?. Still running ultra 1080p no problem. Does Nvidia suck in the fact they will now only release three drivers a year for those who don't want to use shadow play YES! But besides that very big upsetting change I can't get behind I don't see how they are worse then AMD. Nvidia is the market leader they act like it, simple as that. But lets be honest here they release better products with better drivers the majority of the time. It's why they hold the majority of the market.

real.

Thats a nice opinion. Although it focuses only on the one side of the coin.

So lets talk about the other side of the coin.

Unfortunately a lot of people have problems.

When a game runs fine, none will go to the support forums and will say "Hey, it works fine".

So as far as I am watching the gaming community, with new drivers, less people have problems.

But lets go to the root of the problem that I don't know why we avoid.

Why in the hell we need new drivers?

Some time ago an Nvidia engineer said something that revealed the ugly truth.

"Nearly every game ships broken."

Devs obviously trying to spend less money and time and leave the optimisation to driver engineers. Funny thing is that no dev denied it...

I don't remember this happening even in 1999... (ps I am playing games in PC since 1997, Pentium MMX200, 32MB RAM, S3 Virge 2MB.)

TLDR: The games are broken and we need new drivers in order to fix this. So yes, its real.

ps: I don't know about the old drivers but with the new drivers I had 0 crashes with FO4 and I am playing since the release.

ps2: Source about "Nearly every game ships broken."

“Nearly every game ships broken. We’re talking major AAA titles from vendors who are everyday names in the industry. In some cases, we’re talking about blatant violations of API rules – one D3D9 game never even called BeginFrame/EndFrame. Some are mistakes or oversights – one shipped bad shaders that heavily impacted performance on NV drivers. These things were day to day occurrences that went into a bug tracker. Then somebody would go in, find out what the game screwed up, and patch the driver to deal with it. There are lots of optional patches already in the driver that are simply toggled on or off as per-game settings, and then hacks that are more specific to games – up to and including total replacement of the shipping shaders with custom versions by the driver team. Ever wondered why nearly every major game release is accompanied by a matching driver release from AMD and/or NVIDIA? There you go.”

:P

The only thing i love about amd more than nvida that thier games that they support , works in nvidia at great performance , please dont say tomb raider cause triss fx is open source and nvida can adopt it but they didnt .....

It's pure marketing. Many times a game's profile doesn't change at all between an old driver and their "Game Ready" drivers. Hell, the performance is identical too. What are they changing that makes this Game Ready driver any different than past drivers? Not much.

Nvidia is capitalizing on the illusion that things need to be up to date for drivers. Consumers take that as Nvidia supports their products better and have better drivers. Pure Marketing and it is a smart tactic.

Remember when they use to give out details on how much a driver would boost performance on a certain game?

"Increased Performance Up to 10% on "Certain Game" with GTX ***."

They don't even do that anymore. Now they just say. "Game Ready for Optimal Experience in "whatever game the Game Ready driver is for".

There are always new problems with the game ready drivers when I look in the drivers forums. So they must have changed something?

Gimpworks and Geforce Experience are both marketing ploys to incite gamers to buy Nvidia.

Most of the time Gimpworks just makes your game uglier and run slower. Game Ready hardly has any good profiles and you're better off doing it yourself to gain some more FPS. It really depends what is the resource hog on a particular game, because all game engines work differently.

I thought GAME WORKS was more about making it run poorly on AMD cards.. Like overdoing the tessellation effect because nVidia 600 cards and newer are better suited for it than current AMD cards.

It's Pure Marketing.

I can see why in the video review in the end explains why AMD should call their any new drivers "Day 1" drivers.

Notice in the summary in the review the reviewer states that he would like to see AMD "have more "Day 1" drivers updates for more AAA Titles. For AAA titles AMD should just call those Day 1 drivers."

You are right nVidia is capitalizing on the illusion that things need to be updated for to make it seem that they support their products better and have better drivers.

I once asked recently someone why they would choose nVidia over AMD and get a GTX 980 and he stated that nVidia supports newer games better because they have "Game Ready" drivers even though many of those "Game Ready" drivers are still beta drivers. I told him AMD does also they also but he doesn't believe me. AMD does release new drivers for AAA titles but they don't give it a particular name they just call it beta which sucks from a marketing stand point. If they had just called it Day 1 drivers it would sound much better that they are supporting new games from Day 1.

It's interesting that you mentioned that nvidia stopped showing how much performance increase for certain games, I am guessing it's because they are little to no performance increase for newer games. They are just pushing out drivers for the sake of pushing out new drivers to say that "Hey we Support the latest Games" by our products while AMD doessn't.

nVidia doing what nVidia does best: Marketing.

You are right about GAME WORKS gimping AMD cards like overdoing tessellation effect. It also effects the 600 cards because it can't do tessellation as well as the newer nVidia cards that's why the 600 cards do bad as well. nVidia won't share the contents of the .DLL files that are in Game Works so AMD can't optimize their cards for performance increase as explained by AMD's Chief Gaming Scientist Richard Huddy.

I believe the 600 cards were gimped through drivers. At least htat is the rumours I've heard before.

Considering i've been playing all the new titles without any problems, i'd say they are real...

With AMD cards, i've had flickering textures etc. with games that were recently released. That was like 10 years ago when i still used AMD cards (or ATI's, as they were back then), so times might have changed, but it left a bad taste in my mouth. Problems were solved indefinetly after switching to NVIDIA. I know i sound like a fanboy, but my experiences are these, plain and simple.

According to this video. The older architecture are not very tessellation friendly as he suspects that those .DLL files that nVidia hands out to developers without releasing the code, they for example overly tessellate objects more than they need to as Maxwell is more tessellation friendly. Hence, you see performance decrease in the older 600 cards. In other words, they are using Gameworks to suit the current architecture (Maxwell).

Of course this is all speculation as stated by Richard Huddy but he can't provide actual proof because as stated those ,DLL files are hard locked down and nVidia won't share the contents of the code so AMD can optimize their hardware without seeing the actual code.

Imagine trying to make a game where certain portions of the code is hidden from you. All you know is that it works but don't know how it works. It's completely blacked out.

I would not be surprised if that is true and I expect the same to be done when the generation of cards are being released.