Upgrade Video Drivers Today

[Hustapha Thool]

Well I have a 5850 and decided to try the steam update without a clean install. This is the first time I have ever installed a vid driver without removing the old one first and I have to say...

Everything is OK!

 

[Kinseek]

My experience, with NVidia at least, is if you find a driver version that works with your card, you don't upgrade. Each NVidia release is more likely to break things than improve them. (That's especially true with SLI cards.)

I would strongly disagree. I rarely notice such problems on new drivers. The upgrades may also fix bugs you might not obviously notice and often improves performance.

Remember that the intention of an update is to fix problem, and competent people work at minimizing any new problems. The probability is thus that any update reduces problems, not the other way around.

I think you gave a generally unsound and unwise computer advice.

 

[Spiceweasel]

I would strongly disagree. I rarely notice such problems on new drivers. The upgrades may also fix bugs you might not obviously notice and often improves performance.

Remember that the intention of an update is to fix problem, and competent people work at minimizing any new problems. The probability is thus that any update reduces problems, not the other way around.

I think you gave a generally unsound and unwise computer advice.

I recognize that that's the goal; but that doesn't mean it's the reality. I've been burned time and again by upgrading video drivers. Maybe I've been unlucky. I *did* phrase my advice as being based on my experience alone.

Certainly there are lots of factors that affect driver reliability. If you have a latest-generation video card, you're probably going to see big benefits from updating for 3-6 months. After all, that's what the labs and tech support department are spending most of their time on. But if your card is a year or two old, the companies aren't devoting anywhere near as much time and money on supporting it, and the consumers are less likely to raise a fuss about it.

Similarly, the latest drivers are going to be most reliable for configurations that are widely used. The QA/tech support process will have dealt with a *lot* more cases Dell's flagship desktop than some homebrew system with cherry-picked motherboard, RAM, OS, video cards, and BIOS.

For my part, I'm running a two year old homemade water-cooled quad-SLI beast. It was a fun project, but I won't ever do it again - for just the reason stated above. Unusual systems don't get enough QA or support.

 

[Ronan]

Any new software can have loads of bugs on release. Its in the nature of programming, they cant possibly test the thousands of conditions the software will have to run on when its released to the public.

Anyhoo, just updated mine and im having major problems trying to play Dawn of War 2 Chaos Rising since. Frame rate is down to 7... its was running perfect on all the Ultra settings before the update. Anyone know if its possible to install an older version over a new version? Maybe if i uninstall it manually first? I'll leave it as if for now and see if Civ runs ok on it tomorrow but if it doesnt i want a back up plan

 

[Hustapha Thool]

Win 7 has a "rollback" feature. What OS are you using?

 

[Ronan]

Windows 7. Thanks, i'll look into it

 

[durindana]

My experience, with NVidia at least, is if you find a driver version that works with your card, you don't upgrade. Each NVidia release is more likely to break things than improve them. (That's especially true with SLI cards.)

That's even more true of ATI drivers. They try to make game-specific optimizations (you can read them in the release notes) and unless you have a mainstream setup or something they just happened to test a patch against, you're taking your life in your hands running a just-released ATI driver.

 

[Hustapha Thool]

Windows 7. Thanks, i'll look into it

Ya, go to control panel/ system and security/ device manager / click display adapters, right click your vid card, go to properties, click driver tab.

I have never tested it...

 

[Ronan]

I just uninstalled and then reinstalled an older driver version and its back to normal. Thanks God... day before Civ V release

 

[cembandit]

I'm already up-to-date and fired up Steam last night to get that updated too.



Maybe it's an OS thing. On XP Pro I'd always do everything step by step manually. With Win7 updating drivers is smoother (with the ATI updater utility thingie).

Doesn't work with my 4850x2 win7-64

 

[Johnny Be]

Doesn't work with my 4850x2 win7-64

It worked perfectly in my W7 - 4850.