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

[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 If, by installing a newer version of the driver, the instructions have changed for executing a certain functionality, it could affect the performance.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.