Why do video cards get slow when there's an available update?

Submitted ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨yokonzo@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

I’ve been gaming for almost 3 decades now and i’ve seen this time and time again, where i will run a graphically intensive program and suddenly it’s just choppy as shit and running bad. Sure enough though no matter which brand of card i’m using or how new it is, if i go to the gpu program theres a driver update. So clearly this is too much to be a coincidence, so what’s happening here? Surely AMD and Nvidia aren’t both throttling your performance to get you to update right? That’s ridiculous. Can someone smarter than me explain what might be going on? Perhaps the games themselves are updated with new libraries for the cards and those need to stay in sync or something

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Pulptastic@midwest.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
This scenario has a high risk of confirmation bias.

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mp3@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Are you sure it’s not throttling because of a thermal issue? Make sure the fans and heatsink are clean.

It could also be that the factory-applied thermal paste might have degraded over time and reapplying new thermal paste might solve the problem.

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- yokonzo@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  My man it doesn’t seem like you read the whole thing. This has been a thing I’ve noticed for like decades, on different cards and computers, this isn’t a tech support post
  
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  - mp3@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Honestly I haven’t noticed that, so yeah this sounds like a tech support issue on your end.
    
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7heo@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I believe you’re missing the actual causality chain here.

While it is actually proven that vendors will degrade your experience artificially to “motivate” you to buy new devices, in the never ending pursuit of monetary gain, there is no such potential incentive here: you aren’t paying for new drivers.

And while others suggest biases, I do believe you are witnessing an effect that is at least partially real, if not totally, but not for the reasons you believe:

Most programs that leverage GPUs end up being GPU bottlenecked. Meaning that one can almost always improve the program’s performance by using a better GPU.

But then, why does a new driver not improve performance, and rather, simply “bring a degraded performance back to previous levels”?

Well, that has to do with auto-updates, and the way drivers are distributed.

While, in a world where one would have to manually update everything, a new driver would almost certainly mean better performance for a given program, most programs auto-update silently and automatically. And the developers are usually on top of things wrt drivers, because they follow drivers updates closely, get early versions, etc.

Meaning that when a driver is updated, your apps usually are, too. I way that leverage the new driver for more processing, rather than faster processing.

And the consequence of such updates, when you are too slow to update your drivers, is a degraded experience.

Not because anyone artificially throttled your device’s performance, but because you lag too much behind expected updates.

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- sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Having been on Linux for a long time, I forget that people manually update drivers. This sounds like a pretty likely explanation for what’s going on.
  
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systemglitch@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
It’s in your head.

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- SomethingBurger@jlai.lu ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie
  
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Drummyralf@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I think computers can get slow when they are downloading shit in the background. Windows Updates have messed up performance on my work laptop many times.

I think it might just be a coincidence. I believe GPU drivers are updated fairly regular, so it’s most likely that everytime you had a slowdown on your computer for whatever reason, there happened to be an update ready. Corrolation =/= causation.

Others have stated that the restarting after driver install most likely “fixed” your pc everytime.

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Alexstarfire@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I have never had this happen to me in my entire life, which is also about 3 decades of playing video games.

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paysrenttobirds@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
If the games are downloading assets or libraries, I suspect you are right that the cards are just trying to keep in step with software changes, and vice versa. There should be some publication that you could watch to know ahead of time, as the companies and developers are certainly keeping each other informed.

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cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I’ve never had that happen on Linux. There can be issues if you install a new driver and don’t reboot though.

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OrderedChaos@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Sometimes updates are partially installed before you see the notification. That breaks functionality sometimes because they’re trying to make the updates go faster with less down time. It’s really annoying.

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