A brief warning to fellow nVidia users and the WHQL 320.18 driver

[Alhanelem]

How can drivers brick your card?

[SkyeWindbinder]

Thanks for the heads up. I haven't played many games lately and I actually went up to update my drivers this morning but got distracted watching porn and forgot. Whew.

Let this be a lesson, kiddies. Never forget to watch porn. It could save your computer.

Wait, what?

[Aldora]

How can drivers brick your card?

Quite easily. Device drivers are used to communicate with hardware components within a computer. They basically serve as a translator between an application/operating system and the device itself. If, by installing a newer version of the driver, the instructions have changed for executing a certain functionality, it could affect the performance.

Each driver update should contain an updated set of instructions, which would enhance the performance of the devices when performing certain tasks in certain situations.

Good release notes of a driver, application, etc will mention a summary of the chances made to the software package, for example:

Performance Boost – Increases performance by up to 20% for GeForce 400/500/600 series GPUs in several PC games vs. GeForce 314.22 WHQL-certified drivers. Results will vary depending on your GPU and system configuration. Here is one example of measured gains:

GeForce GTX 660:

• Up to 20% in Dirt: Showdown
• Up to 18% in Tomb Raider
• Up to 10% in Metro: Last Light
• Up to 8% in StarCraft II
• Up to 6% in Sniper Elite V2
• Up to 6% in Metro 2033
• Up to 6% in Far Cry 3
• Up to 6% in Deus Ex: Human Revolution
• Up to 5% in F1 2012

Additional Details:

• Installs PhysX System Software 9.12.1031.
• Installs HD Audio v1.3.24.2
• Includes support for applications built using CUDA 5.5 or earlier version of the CUDA Toolkit. More information at http://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolkit
• Supports OpenGL 4.3 for GeForce 400-series and later GPUs.
• Supports DisplayPort 1.2 for GeForce GTX 600 series GPUs.
• Supports multiple languages and APIs for GPU computing: CUDA C, CUDA C++, CUDA Fortran, OpenCL, DirectCompute, and Microsoft C++ AMP.
• Supports single GPU and NVIDIA SLI technology on DirectX 9, DirectX 10, DirectX 11, and OpenGL, including 3-way SLI, Quad SLI, and SLI support on SLI-certified Intel and AMD motherboards.

In some cases, a driver update improves the performance for a specific set of games, but affects the performance for another (unlisted) game in a negative way. This can be caused by a bug which has been introduced within the driver update, or it could be caused by the way a game is trying to render (for instance) lighting in a very specific way which performed properly by chance in the previous driver version.

This is a pretty common situation in software development.

[Alhanelem]

Quite easily. Device drivers are used to communicate with hardware components within a computer.

Normally, drivers send instructions to the firmware on the device itself. Usually the only way to brick a card other than operating it outside of its specifications is to power down the device or otherwise interrupt a firmware upgrade.

[Aldora]

Normally, drivers send instructions to the firmware on the device itself. Usually the only way to brick a card other than operating it outside of its specifications is to power down the device or otherwise interrupt a firmware upgrade.

Ah, you mean brick in that fashion. You basically can't "brick" a GPU with a simple driver update, since it does not affect the firmware of the device. I don't have a clue why people would update/change the firmware of their GPU's unless they want to overclock them in order to increase performance. Like you said, the only way to "brick" your GPU is to interrupt a firmware update. Other then that, the hardware itself broke down.

Installing a new driver will effect the performance of the card, but nothing else.

[Solace]

Typical, thanks man.
I run a SLI 680 set up. I'm going to check the bench and see if it hit me too.

[ShinigamiKayla]

running a 660 ti sc on this driver no performance drop and have had no problems with it since installing it last week

[Dhalmel]

Quite easily. Device drivers are used to communicate with hardware components within a computer. They basically serve as a translator between an application/operating system and the device itself. If, by installing a newer version of the driver, the instructions have changed for executing a certain functionality, it could affect the performance.

Each driver update should contain an updated set of instructions, which would enhance the performance of the devices when performing certain tasks in certain situations.

Good release notes of a driver, application, etc will mention a summary of the chances made to the software package, for example:



In some cases, a driver update improves the performance for a specific set of games, but affects the performance for another (unlisted) game in a negative way. This can be caused by a bug which has been introduced within the driver update, or it could be caused by the way a game is trying to render (for instance) lighting in a very specific way which performed properly by chance in the previous driver version.

This is a pretty common situation in software development.

A couple of users who've installed this driver had their card die. So far there's 2 accounts of a 560 TI and a case of a 480 that have died after having this driver installed.

[Norack]

Very stupid question but I wanted to see what driver I was using and I don't have that much knowledge in it I saw that I am using driver version 9.18.13.1407 Which doesn't look anything like what you are talking about. after doing like 5 seconds of research on Google i found out that that means i'm still using 314.07? Which means there is new drivers for my 680? cause I told it to go online and look for new drivers but it keeps saying that my GPU has the most up to date drivers out there. But after seeing all this do i want to upgrade to what you are saying 314.22 which would be version 9.18.13.1422?

Just asking cause i was really thrown when i saw you talking about 314.22 driver and i saw mine was 9.18.13.1407, which is a completely different format than the 314.XX something, why do they do that?

Edit ----------------
hmm musta done something lol, before i was running on maximum and getting around 5.7k know on max i get around 6.2k

[Solace]

Holy shit, I took over 1k points in loss on the benchmark.. O.o..
Ok, back to the other drivers for me...
GTX680 = go back to older driver.