General Discussions

[jdrobinson314]

This is neither new or old, it's really just a matter opinion; Isn't releasing a driver for every newly released game a bit excessive, bureaucratic even? New game, new driver, what could go wrong? 

It seems like the new features the adrenaline editions brought, such as tweakable per game profiles for even the most detailed settings would have opened up the opportunity for some level of modularity where drivers aren't released every time a new game comes out. The per game driver tweaks, op code, api runaround mods, modality switches, or backwards inside out what-was-this-developer-smoking hack is something that a quick, online, live update through the driver game profiles should be able to solve. 

Otherwise, this is a very bent-over-backwards position to be in when it comes to game developers. And we can see this with Nvidia as well. New game new driver! ... then wait for the driver to 'mature'. Dysfunctional game code shouldn't be a driver level issue. APIs are pretty solid constructs when wrapped for a specific version.

Has anyone ever wondered why a game would need a driver update to work? What kind of spaghetti code abomination could it be running and why do game developers break APIs to such an extent that these driver release are necessary? This is called a circular dependency where either party stands to lose.

[qwixt]

I think most of this is driven by AMD and NVidia wanting to top the FPS charts when GPU reviewers utilize games as benchmarking tools. Thus, they add in optimizations for games so that it makes their hardware look better.

DirectX and 3D game programming is fairly complex, and a game dev can write code and produce a game that works utilizing both amd and nvidia drivers. Optimization is another thing altogether. There are devs that are simply incompetent and cause driver crashes and such. But I think the main reason is what I stated.

[hardcoregames_]

competition between AMD and nVidia is one of the main drivers for game benchmark comparisons galore

at the end of the day drivers are largely the same as before 

the low level code is called a miniport driver, it usually is debugged for each GPU carefully before it is ever released

rest of the driver is fluff for game developers to use

[jdrobinson314]

I'm hoping that they nix the (A.B.x) .x releases and just make that optimization fluff an on demand download blob associated with the game profile. They've already added the

This makes the most sense for a future direction for that game. Big Green star next to the profile - get the fluff from there.

[hardcoregames_]

amd uses the year.month.version system so that users can get an idea of when a driver was released easily

so the current 19.4.3 is April 2019, third release

[pokester]

I agree with you. Both Nvidia and AMD get the bad rap of having bad drivers when all these driver fixes are not because the drivers are bad it is to fix the shortcomings in the code the game developers used that don't meet the DX or other API's standards. The other issue is the use by AMD and more so Nvidia of proprietary hardware features then the game developers optimizing for the non-standard features that the other companies have to figure out how to work around in their drivers. It would be a much better gaming experience on PC if all card makers made their new tech open standards. Then those open standards get adopted into the next revision of the API then all game engines build to those standards. Unfortunately it isn't happening that way and with the further separation of features in the current generation, Nvidias RTX being just one of them, I don't see this problem going away soon. I do hope though that once true DX12 engines become the norm, that it will begin to get better.

For the moment I share your frustration. It feels like one step forward and two steps back most the time.

[jdrobinson314]

Yeah, this fiddling with new tech is good but frustrating. This is really the only way hardware developers have a means to push new techniques on us though, so we're sort of at an impasse with how to go forward with such new innovation without the messes that it creates for consumers. I think the way they're blebbing out drivers is just ...messy.

I'm personally a proponent of Vulkan, AMD's GPUOpen, and somewhat on board with DirectX12 ( is a good API, but also proprietary to windows and some console ports )...

AMD is far more open source, open standards than NVIDIA and Microsoft. 

[pokester]

I agree, I personally think everyone should just go Vulkan and not look back.

[hardcoregames_]

pokester wrote:

I agree, I personally think everyone should just go Vulkan and not look back.

vulkan tends to be more demanding than even dx12

[pokester]

If you says so. Not been my experience. 

[hardcoregames_]

I have seen some games balk with my gtx 1060 3gb card

even though its powerful, vulkan wants more vram etc

[jdrobinson314]

This is why I point out the game profiles. Compatibility ( see the current upgrade advisor, it's kind of a single feature that could be more useful ) + game profiles could be lumped into a single 'treatments' panel, subsection. I use 'treatments' loosely... it's more like application specific profiles since I think 3d APIs ( vulkan specifically ) can apply to productivity applications as well as any other.

Seems logical to include app profiles as well as game profiles in the same space as well as add the upgrade advisor information here as well. So the upgrade advisor could also work in favor of micro updates for the game-specific, application specific 'driver' enhancements. 

That categorical extension to apps might be a thing in radeon pro drivers already, I don't know.

Completely dropping the system of updating the driver base every time a new game comes out and instead using the game profiles to download an enhancement profile ( and any tweaks)  would modularize the tweaks. People not needing the profiles would not be bothered by the update cycle.

This creates a clear separation between major revisions in the actual driver-as-a-product with features and application specific tweaks.

[pokester]

On the AMD side that has never been the case. On the Nvidia side, yes they were way behind on Vulkan optimization, but that is not the current case in my experience. You can now for instance run Vulkan in Doom on Nvidia and it is the fastest way to run the game. Obviously there are always exceptions based on different hardware, software and personal bias. The original point being of the post though that constant driver updates being a pain. I agree and added that Vulkan being a modern API and literally is or could be adopted on any platform would be a great way to put behind the current way of doing things and make the gaming world a better place where you could spend more time playing games not writing in forums about why you can't play them. If the you had one modern open source API across all platforms it would ultimately make things so much better. It will likely never happen as greed will never allow it.

[hardcoregames_]

Doom on my GTX 1060 3GB gripes about VRAM