Nvidia 556.12 driver

[TechManMax]

Has anyone tested the new driver? 555.xx caused time spy scores to drop significantly (1000 on GPU and 3000 on CPU). Was also causing games to crash like halo infinite as well as stuttery performance. Anyone tested the new driver? I'm still on 552.44 (after rolling back from 555.99).

[stahlhart]

I will try it out and compare scores tonight -- lately I'm liking the 551.86 drivers.

Edit:

The 556.12 drivers overall are slightly slower than 551.86; I'm seeing score variations on average about 1.5% lower, give or take 1%. Largest difference I saw was Solar Bay, about 600 points. But they are quite stable here, and for that reason I think I'm going to stick with them, in spite of the very slightly lower scores.

You mentioned Time Spy, which in my case was the only exception -- it scored higher with the new drivers. Here are the results:

https://www.3dmark.com/spy/48827304 (556.12)

https://www.3dmark.com/spy/48722739 (551.86)

GPU is an MSI RTX 4090 Suprim X Liquid.

[TechManMax]

Originally posted by stahlhart:

I will try it out and compare scores tonight -- lately I'm liking the 551.86 drivers.

Edit:

The 556.12 drivers overall are slightly slower than 551.86; I'm seeing score variations on average about 1.5% lower, give or take 1%. Largest difference I saw was Solar Bay, about 600 points. But they are quite stable here, and for that reason I think I'm going to stick with them, in spite of the very slightly lower scores.

You mentioned Time Spy, which in my case was the only exception -- it scored higher with the new drivers. Here are the results:

https://www.3dmark.com/spy/48827304 (556.12)

https://www.3dmark.com/spy/48722739 (551.86)

GPU is an MSI RTX 4090 Suprim X Liquid.

I noticed your GPU score dropped though. Anyway benchmarks aside how is gaming performance? 555.99 was a stuttery crashing mess. 552.44 has been pretty stable for me.

Worth updating??

[stahlhart]

Originally posted by TechManMax:

I noticed your GPU score dropped though. Anyway benchmarks aside how is gaming performance? 555.99 was a stuttery crashing mess. 552.44 has been pretty stable for me.

Worth updating??

Probably only if the later driver fixes some other unique issue or is game ready for a recent title. Otherwise might as well stay in place. I was on 537.58 for quite a while.

556.12 is showing slight score decreases, but not enough of a difference to really matter to me. I care much more about stability than scores now.

[TechManMax]

Yeah stability is the reason I rolled back to 552.44 (the scores going back to normal was just an added bonus). I've seen a YouTube video comparing this new driver to 555.99 and it's an obvious improvement on that mess of a driver but at the same time I'm seeing reports of this new driver causing stuttering for those who updated to it from earlier drivers so I guess there's only one thing to do now...try for myself and rollback if needby.

[stahlhart]

Something else I've noticed about this driver, that I almost forgot about -- no DPC latency spikes any longer. It uses the most cumulative execution time, but keeps the individual events below 300uS. The OS kernel events are higher, but in my case that's due to enabling C states to downclock the CPU cores when idling:

https://postimg.cc/NLTP05t7
https://postimg.cc/gnWtLmk9

Not sure which driver version fixed it, as I haven't looked at this in a long time, but glad they finally fixed it.

[Zenofir]

I noticed a big performance loss in Time Spy Extreme from a recent Nvidia driver, so I rolled back. On the earlier driver, my TSE graphics score was usually in the 19200s, sometimes 19300s. Today I installed 556.12. Same problem seems to be present as in the other recent driver, because with it installed, my TSE graphics score is in the 18800s.