GeForce Driver 352.86 WHQL {DO NOT USE DEGRADED PERFORMANCE BY 50%}

nvidia makes **** drivers over a year.There are a lot complains on geforce forums that a AMD card in 2013 was slower than the rival card from NVIDIA and in 2014 they are equal and in 2015 AMD took the lead with same card which was 2years ago slower.I cant remeber the exact card but i saw 260x doing better in witcher 3 than 750ti(maxwell) and 750 ti is a better card for sure

 

Agreed. I couldn't give two hoots about DSR with a high pixel density screen - 1080p looks great; heck, even 900p looks decent on a 1080p 13.3" screen. Also the reason why I don't use anything more than FXAA for newer games.

For those with a 17" or bigger 1080p screen with two 980Ms, sure, have fun with all that eye-candy. But I'd rather a stable driver that allows overclocking without crashing all the time, instead of features that I'll never use.

The driver is ridiculously unstable now - all of my games, even CoD: BO from 2011 that used to run at 60 FPS consistently, now crash because of a driver crash (Nvidia Display Driver has stopped working). Nvidia, please fix this crap ASAP.

 

I'd thought I'd chime in. These drivers are rubbish on my desktop 980. I get the Nvidia Display Driver has stopped working system stalls every now and again.
Plus a unique double image blur on boot up occasionally that I also experienced with my 980m's on my external monitor.
The latter appears to be an ongoing issue (I believe based around a lacking database in monitor device Id's in newer drivers, thus laziness). Nvidia dont officially acknowledge the bug.
Nvidia are getting my vote for worst company of the year.. They just inched past Ubisoft for me.

 

Maybe their strategy is rooted in some kind of misguided belief that users will forget about quality, performance and overall stability if they bombard them with gimmicks like GeForce Experience, Shadowplay, Battery Boost, in-home streaming, DSR and other silly toys that are mostly useful as distractions. Oh wait... it's not a misguided belief. Many users are like that... easily distracted by stuff that just isn't necessary or best left to a third-party software developer.

 

Screw it, I'm not updating my drivers until this whole thing is sorted out. Not like I'm playing anything other than Skyrim nowadays anyway.

 

You guys are scaring me even more from getting a 980m. I'm stuck with this overheating 880m gpu that doesn't even let me max out modern games =(

 

It's the drivers, not 980M, that is the problem. The last three drivers haven't worked well for many people (desktop and mobile).

 

All the "gimmicks" that Nvidia offers - Battery Boost, DSR, Shadowplay, One-click settings optimisation - I don't use a single one of those. Shadowplay is useful, granted, but I'm a gamer, not a streamer, and I hate talking while gaming. I've disabled Battery Boost, which is basically a glorified SpeedStep. DSR - completely useless to me (reasons already stated above). I've only ever used the one-click optimisation for one game - GTA V, which I found to be a decent set of settings which I tweaked a little further. Everything else was ridiculously far off.

What Nvidia needs now, is a big hit in stocks as a result of user dissatisfaction. Money matters, nothing else. They lose money, they will get their arses in order.

 

Yup, I agree with that. Same thing needs to happen to Micro$haft. Consumers could call all of the shots and have anything they wanted if they would organize, work together, boycott, etc. Trying to get all gamers, power users and PC performance enthusiasts organized is like herding cats. Ain't going to happen, so we all end up paying for it in the long run. We get bullied, told what to think, what to like, and eventually resign ourselves to accept garbage because the alternative requires too much effort.

 

Your machine should be fine. Go ahead and get a 980M.

I swear, the day I get shadowplay-like performance from any fully fleshed out video recording software, I will never turn on Shadowplay again. The shadowtime is beyond useful for capturing the epic moments ( like these) and the negligible performance hit due to their excellent capture methods (rather than using the NVENC encoder alone) is awesome, but the lack of audio options and otherwise-barebones program options all make me wish my preferred program Playclaw would update their hooking methods.

Ha, shadowplay is terrible for streaming. NVENC on the whole is terrible for streaming, in fact. It's only useful if your CPU is absolutely maxed out and you can't use x264 for some actual decent quality. And even then if you're on single GPU (like you are) and your GPU is running full bore 99%, below 60fps, even then it will barely do a decent job using NVENC's encoder as your GPU won't have the power leftover for it.

 

Yeah, I really like Shadowplay and use it frequently for video capture. It's amazing and I am glad I have it, too. But, I'd give it up without any hesitation to never have any more issues with NVIDIA crap malfunctioning. The degree of functionality versus malfunction is all over the board for desktop and mobile... extremely inconsistent user experience. Ironically, consistency used to be a strong selling point for them. Inconsistency has been a hallmark trait for AMD drivers and now NVIDIA want to be the best at having the most inconsistent drivers that impair the pleasure of ownership, LOL.

Edit: not sure AMD is actually getting better as much as not offering anything new for ages. Harder to screw that up, I suppose.

 

Out of curiosity, what is the best driver to use with desktop card?

 

As said this is a driver problem. 347.88 works without issues on my 980M, stock or OC.

Nice vids, and now I have a voice to go with your avatar

 

Not being able to answer that question is part of the problem. The experiences are all over the board. This driver works fine for some, but not for others even with the same GPU. Before 350.12 drivers it wasn't quite this inconsistent, but it has been a roll of the dice since the release of Maxwell. The most accurate answer is probably that best driver is the one that works best for the individual user. While it is common for the unhappy to post complaints and more common for the content to remain silent, you can see from these threads in GeForce Forums that there are plenty of issues with NVIDIA's driver quality.

Official NVIDIA 350.12 WHQL Game Ready Display Driver Feedback Thread (Released 4/13/15)

Official NVIDIA 352.86 WHQL Game Ready Display Driver Feedback Thread (Released 5/18/15)

Announcing Hotfix driver 353.00 (fixes for mobile GPU only)

When Kepler replaced Fermi it was this way. It seems like only yesterday that Fermi users were screaming bloody murder that drivers for Kepler burned up their Fermi GPUs. It took about a year for the bumps in the road to level out. We should buckle up again when Pascal is released, because it will likely be a repeat of the same kind of driver fiasco.

 

The best drivers I've used, without modifcations, are 344.91 or 347.88.

Right now I'm using 352.86 just until I finish The Witcher 3 because the latest patch improved performance for it.

 

Performance wise I don't have a good idea right now. I'm fairly new to the 980 game so I haven't been able to observe any real evolution as far a performance goes. I do expect brother Fox is right on the money with his assessment though.

As far as stability goes, there are those goofy issues I mentioned a few posts back that only started happen since the GTA5 drivers.

 

And to think that Pascal will already be much faster than Maxwell. Nvidia will probably crap up the drivers so much that the perceived improvement is actually much better than it actually would be, by messing with the performance of Maxwell GPUs.

 

Doubt the hotfix drivers will run any better but so glad they added DSR support. Can replay my old games with crisp graphics.

 

LOL... No DSR here due to Optimus...

BTW drivers have been rock stable.. Been having 0 problems with them and work perfectly

Thanks to @j95 for his alienware inf mods ...