How necessary are vid driver upgrades?

It's been a while since I've been around but I know I can get accurate information from forum members here. My over 2 year old notebook has been a reliable performer and has enabled me to play a variety of games including S.T.A.L.K.E.R., F.E.A.R., BioShock and others. Right now I'm going through HL2 episode 2 with no problems.

I just checked out Chaz's thread and decided to hit the ATI mobility link. Much to my surprise, these drivers are up to version 8.8 and I'm still running 7.5's! Now I'm not one to fix something if it isn't broke and I know there are physical limitations to hardware, but, would I see a recognizeable performance increase if I bumped drivers? Thanks all.

 

Most of the time, newer drivers come out to fix problems...not increase performance.

HOWEVER, in your case you might want to consider it. Try reading the release notes from the all the other driver releases between 7.5 and 8.8 and see if they mention mostly bug fixes or performance improvements in specific games.

ATI has, in the past, been very open with that information and you should be able to see if an update will benefit you.

 

If it aint broke, fix it until it is!!

Seriously though, as Greg said, most updates are fixes to specifics bugs on certain games. Don't expect that you're 3 year old GPU is going to start performing like a new champ.

If you have a newly released GPU (less than 6 months old), I'd definitely keep looking for new optimized drivers. Most of the performance bugs and issues are taken care of in the first few months. After that, they are already on to their next generation of cards.

 

Thanks for the input folks! I'll check the update logs to see if anything was specifically addressed with the games I run.

 

Hey you could always give them a shot and find out, and if you don't like them reinstall the old drivers.