Graphics New Drivers for old cards lower performance?

Hi guys, a friend of mine told me that NVIDIA deliberately lowers the performance of
old series graphics cards with newly released drivers in order to sell new ones

Is that possible ?

 

No, but what Nvidia does is drop optimization support of older games in favor of new games.

 

If you find a new driver hinders rather than improves performance you can always role them back to your previous driver.

 

while theoretically possible, i strongly doubt they would do such a thing. it would make no sense to piss off thier user base with underhanded tactics. mostly they just stop optimizing for older cards, and then eventually stop supporting them on new driver releases. they don't do anything to make them worse intentionally.

 

I always thought it would be great to see some independent testing on this subject, never seen any. I agree it's unlikely, newer cards tend to offer more features as well as performance boosts.

 

It's been stated alot of times allready, that there might be performance-drops with new drivers.

Like said allready, this has to do with discontinued optimization for the older cards and sometimes newly added stuff in the drivers (stuff that's not well supported by the older cards for example) may result in a worse performance of the old cards in the end.

 

To answer the question myself , I run 3D Mark Vantage benchmark with one of my old driver. My gtx 275 successfully completed the test with gpu score 11650, then I downloaded the latest nvidia 270.61 driver and test again, the driver or card failed to complete the benchmark.

Maybe it is not a good idea to upgrade drivers after new series come out

 

Most recent experience I had was going from the 260.99 to the later 286 (Or something around there) the jump to GTX4xx card support. The difference in framerates on my poor old GTS 250? A measly 0.01 slower.

If there is a performance drop, it's nigh un-noticable.

 

It could simply be a driver bug. Nothing to worry about. I already got a driver that made TF2 crash when playing a match. The next version solved the problem. Of course, the problem was reported on Nvidia forum.

 

Yeah, I don't care whether the new driver succeed 3d mark vantage or not actually. If it fails while playing any game then I may consider rolling the driver back.