I’ll be playing a game, and then one day it won’t work. After updating my graphics drivers, it works again. But the game didn’t receive an update, so why does it just break?
OS updates can do this.
^This. I can tell every time my pc updates by the fact that nothing ever works correctly anymore.
Literally just downloaded video drivers yesterday due to this, and I have the vast majority of auto updates turned off for windows… Every update moves me closer to switching Os entirely.
speaking of which, what’s a good way to keep all my drivers updated? I feel like I’ve been slacking on that.
Nvidia and AMD both have programs that’ll let you know when you have a driver update. It’ll handle it automatically past you needing to click ‘go’, from what I remember(I haven’t had a Nvidia gpu in a few years.) For AMD it’s called Adrenaline, and for Nvidia it’s Geforce Experience.
I don’t find that anything but GPUs really need regular driver updates.
Modern, performant computer graphics is an incredibly complex topic full of hacks, workarounds, and edge cases. It’s possible that an update to DirectX/OpenGL/Vulkan caused some edge case interaction between the application and the graphics pipeline to fail somewhere. Updating the GPU driver (mesa, nvidia, amdgpu, or whatever Windows equivalent) could mitigate that failure.
I remember having to update the Nvidia Windows driver when Cyberpunk 2077 was released to fix an issue related to transparent foliage (transparency is always a pain in the ass to deal with).
hacks, workarounds, and edge cases
That’s always what I thought when they release a new driver for a specific game. I’m like “seriously? Do they check the executable or something?” Yes, yes they do.
They do that on Linux as well. Depending on the name of your Doom 3 executable you’d get different performance, if I recall correctly.
It’s always funny to see that drivers and operating systems are littered with workarounds for (in my eyes) shoddy bugs in downstream applications.
My guess is that your OS changed.
But I wouldn’t put some GPU manufacturers breaking your hardware on purpose completely out of the picture.
