Frustrations with Nvidia Ddriver Updates

[spugm1r3]

I've been using Nvidia products consistently for the last 3-4 years and, by and large, I've been pretty pleased with them. However, in the last 6 months or so, I find myself increasingly frustrated with the driver updates. After every update now, I have to manually return many of my settings back to where I had them before the update.

In fairness, I have a niche setup, running SLI with three monitors, but it doesn't seem like it should be incredibly difficult, unless the code changes significantly, to save these variables. I understand the desire to simply reset everything to some default, as it simplifies the testing and validation of the drivers, but it's incredibly unfriendly from a customer stand point.

I updated to 344.48 this morning and it took me 20 minutes and 3 different reboots to get all of my monitors to work. SLI was disabled and peripheral monitors were swapped; re-enabling SLI caused one of the peripheral monitors to constantly search, and not find a signal and, at one point, the system reboot itself, which I haven't seen since my old 7800GT. At this point, I'm still not certain if any of my video specific settings have ben reverted.

I'm an enthusiast, so this didn't defeat me, but I could see many less avid tinkers, the ones who simply turn on automatic updates and forget about it, losing faith quick. What I'm wondering, is my experience an isolated issue? Or do we all just silently put up with it because it's in our nature to either fix it ourselves, or assume it is unfixable?

 

[Deleted member 189430]

Nvidia driver updates disabled SLI back when I had GTX 480's in SLI. When the 480's were just released. Of course, I always check the "perform clean installation" box, so that might have something to do with it. But after I discovered that it turned off SLI, I always went back to enable it once installed future updates.

And I don't know many "less avid tinkers" with SLI setups. They're the ones who buy brand name PC's and never check/install updates anyways! lol

 

[Armenius]

If you're on a multimonitor setup I would do a complete clean installation with the newest drivers. 344.48 added a lot of features for Surround that are probably messing around with your setup, including support for up to 5 monitors.

Driver pains are to be expected with new hardware releases. My rule of thumb is to give at least 3 months for them to iron everything out before hopping on the "bitching" bandwagon.

 

[spugm1r3]

Driver pains are to be expected with new hardware releases. My rule of thumb is to give at least 3 months for them to iron everything out before hopping on the "bitching" bandwagon.

I agree with this sentiment, which is why I brought this here, instead of the Nvidia forums.

In regards to a clean installation, I'll have to give that a go. It used to be that I would always do that, but over the last few years it started to feel overkill.