New Nvidia Gforce drivers

Nothing specific listed for the FS2020 but does have improvements for the 30x series.

I am so concerned with this mate. Nvidia Updates today, MSFS updates tomorrow, so the tomorrow update will be already broken, one day before its release :frowning: just using my cristal ball lol

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Do drivers change that much every iteration? They added NVIDIA Reflex stuff and ā€˜best experienceā€™ support for another title, and tweaked the RTX3000 stability. Donā€™t you think the driver software of the older cards stay exactly the same by now?

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I bet a lot is adding more game titles to the little tuning setting that you can get at in the Nvidia control panel or GeForce Experience.

Maybe also some bug fixes or general tuning, but I never update real quick. ā€œThe early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.ā€ :small_airplane: :smiley_cat:

Well, there is no way to know it really. In the software industry, each piece of code is organized inside modules or packages, whenever you change a module you are at risk of generating collateral effects on other modules. This risk is increased since Nvidia and MS are two separate companies, relying on the same piece of software for different things. So yeah, the potential danger is there, a change in A might affect B. Probably MS is aware of that change in the driver, so if that happens two things may occur, Nvidia releases a hotfix, or, we wait another month for a fix from MS.

There is a view that the CTDs from 3080 cards may in part, be driver-related so any little helps I think.

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Personally i never experienced a bug in a specific title caused by the nvidia driver. There are a lot of games out there. As far as iā€™m aware the games talk to graphics APIā€™s like DirectX or Vulkan which in turn talk to the drivers. I donā€™t see what a driver has to do with MSFS directly when DirectX is the middle man? Maybe some bug in MSFS can cause the driver to crash but i havenā€™t experienced a driver crash in this game.

Yeah, I understand what you say. I will explain in simple terms just to be more clear, I am having a relaxed morning here so why not lol.
Imagine your Tesla car can drive by itself, The car by itself i a piece of software, a so called a Module. The testa has a module of software that calculates everything. Now imagine The tesla uses Google maps to build routes. Google maps is the second module. Tesla uses a line of code named ā€œgiveMeTheBestRouteā€, which considers that the best route are the ones made of asphalt. The next day Google changes that same line of code, while Tesla was expecting to receive an asphalted route, now Google decides that the same line of code will give them a Dirt route. Suddenly your Tesla decides he wants to travel along dirt streets if there is one, or it will simply stay still wherever it is waiting for asphalted street to appear on the giveMeTheBestRoute code.

This is an oversimplification, in reality, code is much MUCH more unpredictable, especially when you have hundred of modules talking each other, millions of lines of code nobody tested(AKA Microsoft). So you have millions of lines of code expecting the correct data as input. They were expecting an asphalt road, but they received a Dirty one (is dirty a correct word? lol), you tesla doesnā€™t work anymore.

Nvidia is by itself a module, MS is the second Module. In the ideal scenario, nothing should happen, I hope nothing happen tomorrow. I updated today the driver and I am already seen my trees doesnā€™t look the same as the day before. Is it related to Nvidia? nobody knows

Cheers brother and thanks for the conversation

Haha thanks for the analogy, but i understand how it works i am a developer myself. :wink:

But again we donā€™t deal with drivers, we deal with the API. And nvidia doesnā€™t deal with every individual game, it only works on making their cards work stable with the APIā€™s. Thatā€™s why tens of thousands of games continue to work after every driver update. If it worked that way every driver update would be a mess with panicking developers worldwide.

And for the same reason games donā€™t care if you have an nvidia or amd card because the driver is hidden behind the API. MSFS only uses the API to talk to the graphics card.

Sometimes driver fixes can cause major changes in speed and stability. They can also fix small issues that arenā€™t broadcast.
If the change includes a major fix or performance improvement, they would usually brag about it.

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So far I could not see any difference. Works.

Haha. Cutā€™s through with an anecdote.
Good tech discussion though.

And what happens when DX11 talks to the driver, through the OS, and something fails in between? Why do they have to release Driver hotfixes to solve a certain game problem (be it a bug, crash, or bad performance)? Why are driver updates specifically targeted to certain games? Why are we all expecting driver updates to improve our quality of life in MSFS? I mean, I understand drivers ideally should be a generic piece of code targeted to the universe of software using it, but I think it is not that simple.

it only works on making their cards work stable with the APIā€™

this means, in other terms, making the driver work more stable with DX11. So, here you have two modules again trying to communicate somehow. The fact that it tries to make it work more stable implies that there is a strong bond between both right? one affecting the other in some way. The DX11 sending a message to the OS who asks the card through the driver to do something. But what happens if DX11 was expecting something to happen but the driver does a slightly different thing? what happens if the driver writes 1 bit in a block-cell of the GPU and DX11 wasnā€™t expecting that?

I just searched google for examples and there are tons related to driver updates breaking games, I am too lazy to copy-paste an interesting one lol

Ey, this conversation is interesting mate. Please, beg your pardon if I sound I am arguing, my English is a bit limited and I use the words that come to my mind :smiley: I even forgot where this conversation came from lol

Iā€™ll reply back later if you reply. I do not assume I have the correct response to every question, this conversation can go very deeply into the veins of DX11-OS-Driver inner workings.

PS: my Tesla analogy was a good one uh! :smiley:

Yes, works on my machine. Old developer jokeā€¦

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Well at least you can always downgrade NVidia, as opposite to FS2020 :wink:

Haha yes it gets complicated and lengthy quick :slight_smile:

You are right in it does happen that a game exposes a new driver issue but this mostly happens with new tech like RTX and DLSS or new cards like RTX3000 series. And it causes obvious graphics issues like texture corruption, strange colors on the screen or weird flickering. Maybe some Alt-tab or full screen problems. MSFS still uses DX11 though and this is very stable after years of testing.

My point was the patches by Asobo and nvidia are not likely to create a perfect storm of graphics issues not seen before. Iā€™ve seen a lot of bugs in MSFS but none of them seemed to be related to graphics hardware.

And by the game specific drivers you mean the ā€˜Game readyā€™ drivers nvidia releases? Just like the one for MSFS on launch day? They just add the game to Geforce Experience so it can optimize your graphics settings for your hardware.

And if it will happen (which is unlikely) you can still go back to another driver.

Installed 456.55 tonight and had a couple of very quick flights over Tokyo and Las Vegas, two of the more challenging areas for FPS. Both felt slightly smother than before and possibky slightly bet FPS but not massively different. Still doesnā€™t seem to have got any worse though.

Instead of all of the hyperbole, anyone can read the actual release notes to see what they donā€™t advertise on the front page:

The driver is basically the instructions for software to communicate with the hardware. Even though DC 11 has been around, there are always things changing that require updates. You have windows updates, game releases that have issues and chipsets that benefit from updated. Thatā€™s why one of the first suggestions when having a problem is ā€œdo you have the latest firmware and drivers installed?ā€

I only update the ā€˜game readyā€™ driver if it specifically states that it enhances the sim or game im interested in. running 452.06