 It feels like every driver update we get from Nvidia prompts a huge spike in forum posts and angry tweets saying Nvidia ruined my FPS in GameX with driver yyy.zz and planned obsolescence But is there really any rhyme or reason to these claims? Or is it just a bunch of crap? We tested it and we're gonna tell ya after these messages Browse privately and securely with TunnelBear the simple VPN app start your seven-day free trial at the link in the video description Now before we really get into this I want to clarify that I've been a long time Skeptic when it comes to Nvidia and AMD Conspiracy theories they're almost always half-baked fanboy purchase decision reinforcing rants and frankly they make my brain hurt seriously Jake tried a lot of different search terms all the way from Nvidia driver hurts performance to Nvidia broken help Please and not even one post contained concrete evidence of a legitimate decrease in performance Over time I mean don't get me wrong there were a lot of posts about the 375.86 drivers memory clock issue But no one has gathered sufficient or really any evidence showing that Nvidia has purposely harmed performance of older cards to force their users to upgrade Through a driver update so I decided to painstakingly Assign Jake the task of testing it ourselves First we needed to pick some games We wanted a mix of ones that use only standard features of the DirectX API and at least one example that uses Nvidia's proprietary game works Then to ensure we weren't missing out on a particular architecture that got kneecapped because it was like too good Compared to the new thing they needed to sell we grabbed a flagship from every generation from GTX 680 all the way To 1080 Ti with games and cards selected the next challenge was drivers We can't test all of them so we eventually settled on the drivers one release After the launch of each card that we used and the most recent one available at this time So the idea then was that this would show us a clear progression over time is Nvidia improving ignoring or outright Harming the performance of older cards once the new generation comes out so driver by driver card by card Jake ran almost 200 rounds of benchmarks collecting three metric ass tons of data Then he sat down to organize it into some charts and the results are astonishingly boring The most recent release seems to be a bit of a turd across the board so there's that but in general Not only did performance not decrease there were small but noticeable increases over time in almost every case Due to the miniscule nature of these improvements. It's hard to see where they actually start and end so we're not much closer to a clear picture of Nvidia's internal policy with respect to product software support But it does at least tell us that Nvidia has never rolled out a sandbag edition driver Which doesn't mean they've never rolled out a bad driver 375.86 hurt performance and SLI issues seem to come and go like shadow from Final Fantasy 6 So what is going on then where are people getting these ideas? We think the perception mostly stems from this when a new game launches Older GPUs don't get the full Optimization treatment the way that the current ones would that means that you might run into situations Where older cards with more raw power might be beat by newer ones with less? Techspot showcased this in their articles on project cars and battlefield one performance Which are linked down in the video description where you can see a GTX 970 outperforming a 780 Ti and There's another major factor the tech Not all graphics solutions are the same the goal with every new generation is to tailor it For the features of the game engines that are in wide use or are right on the horizon examples would be Nvidia specific features like hairworks or General rendering techniques like HBAo plus ambient occlusion older silicon doesn't handle either of these things as well because they either didn't exist when it was being designed or Nvidia guess it wouldn't be widely implemented the work of designing a GPU Starts years before you'll be able to buy one I mean if you were in the PC scene a few years back you might remember this happening with tessellation Nvidia cards were and still seem to be much faster at rendering Tessellated meshes to such a degree that AMD had to add AMD optimized tessellation to their drivers basically removing a bunch of it and when Crytek Controversially put an overkill amount of tessellation in crisis 2 it completely tanked the ability of similarly performing AMD cards compared to their Nvidia counterparts so in this case your older hardware literally wasn't made for the questionable decisions of game devs in newer games So in conclusion then from our testing Nvidia does not appear to be slowing down older cards to encourage upgrades The better performance from newer cards probably has more to do with their engineers Not just sitting on ass all day I mean look at it from their perspective if they don't optimize this from generation to generation Jensen will yell at them What does seem like it's happening is that newer game features aren't getting as much optimization for older cards? But I also think it's a little unreasonable to get too mad at Nvidia for this They support cards as far back as the 8000 series on Windows 10 And while they might not perform clock for clock the same as they used to they simply weren't built for modern rendering technologies So if you want bleeding edge performance you need to be on the bleeding edge in terms of hardware Whether or not that's worth bleeding your wallet dry That one's up to you You know what the funny thing about Squarespace is all of their gorgeous website templates feature responsive design So your website looks great whether it's on a square screen or a rectangular one or even if you turn it this way And the best thing about Squarespace is they make it so anyone can build a website It starts at just 12 bucks a month They've got 24 7 support via live chat and email and their cloud-based Website building tool has tons of great features like their logo designer Commerce every website comes with a free online store their cover pages feature that lets you build a simple one page online presence in minutes and The fact that you can try it with no strings attached Start a trial with no credit card required and start building your website today Then when you sign up for Squarespace go to Squarespace.com slash LTT and use offer code LTT to get 10% off So thanks for watching guys Let us know if there are any other brands or conspiracy theories like this that you'd like us to investigate if this video sucked You know what to do, but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the Stuff we featured in the video description also link down There's our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum, which you should totally join 384 dot 76 wait they make my brain hurt There were small but no I always hate that after these messages these messages And now I am these messages damn