A while back, after hearing people swearing up and down that 457.30 were the best drivers for performance, I decided to test this out for myself.
I have a benchmark flight that I use every time to test performance between patches. I typically fly it with zero traffic, clear skies, etc to try to reproduce it as closely as possible every time.
I used DDU to clean my drivers, and rolled back to 457.30. I flew my test flight for 10 minutes, then upgraded to the next driver, and repeated. After 8 driver reinstalled from 457.30 to the most recent at the time, I saw no perceivable difference in frame rate or smoothness of my experience (RTX 2080),
So I’m honestly quite skeptical about these “night and day” differences people claim between driver versions. Perhaps there’s some difference on 3000 series cards, since I’m sure the changes to the drivers are targetting those devices mostly vs older cards. But I honestly haven’t seen any.