WHQLD'ed Nvidia 375.86

[Adam Howarth]

Top of the morning folks,

 

Nvidia has released their WHQL'ed build 375.86

 

Release notes are at:

 

http://us.download.nvidia.com/Windows/375.86/375.86-win10-win8-win7-desktop-release-notes.pdf

[Triplane]

If it ain't broke, don't fix it..........

[renault]

Adam, I for one do appreciate you providing this update as it is a great way to follow current trends in this area. However, I do recall when I started my engineering career a very wise mentor told me " The fastest way to break something is to "fix it " when it isn't broken ".

 

Unfortunately, my experience with driver updates is that sometimes the update does help, but many times the improvement could at best be described as a "placebo effect". I did go through several upgrades when Win10 first came out and the upgraded drivers did make an improvement but I have now stopped upgrading as of Geforce 364.72. 

 

Whenever I get the urge I do 3 things : 1) Create a restore point  ..... 2) Ask myself is this upgrade specifically designed to address an issue that I am having. 3) Create a test case or test flight that I can use in a repeatable way to really see if I have obtained an improvement.  

 

In all cases, I have obtained the best results by using a tool called "Display Driver Uninstaller" from http://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstaller-download.html which does a complete cleanup of all driver files , registry keys etc. I then run the nvidia driver installer in clean install mode.

 

I have also found that if the new driver doesn't work out as anticipated, that using DDU and then reinstalling the previous driver in clean install mode has always allowed me to get back to a previous installation, without running the restore point , which I keep as a "last ditch backup" 

 

 And lastly, before I go through with it I have another think about my question 2 and  my mentors comments ....

 

Cheers

Renault

 

 

 

[Adam Howarth]

Renault all good  People will make their own choices. Recently NVIDIA has'nt had the best run with us seeing numerous hot fixes being released ontop of their planned production releases. Let's hope their regression testing will improve and I know that they do run a very significant test lab for their regression testing. The challenge of their testing process is an enormous one.

 

I'm not the hugest fan of DDU it leaves cruft including a service left installed to escalate privileges but I can see the use for it when you have to use it to purge a corrupted install

[jmorvay1971]

Honestly, in the future, why not add to these announcements a disclaimer that if anyone is experiencing issues with the current drivers, they can download the new ones.  In my experience with "keeping up with the Joneses", I found that I had to rollback drivers in order to achieve either stability or leave everything as is.  There are so many posts around the net, concerning drivers and their effects on a sim, with just as many saying to stick with what you have as there are who state that new drivers make the sim better.

 

Chances are great that when new driver updates come along, they pertain more to current games than for the simulators.  I also wouldn't mind if LM, LR or DTG put their two cents in to either say yes or no to driver updates as they should know what really works well and what doesn't.

 

If I may add fuel to the fire, I also have never ever had the need to use a special uninstaller for graphics drivers.  If a new one came along, I used the feature built in to the nvidia installer to have it perform a clean install.  I really never understood why there is a need for a special uninstaller unless a user has gone out of their way to screw up something.