Substance Painter has been bugging me for a while to update the graphics card drivers for my 970m. When Unity suddenly decided to tell me that my GPU doesn’t support profiling, I decided to give in and update them (didn’t fix the profiler). But WOW! The performance increase was unbelievable. My scene was getting about 80fps in the editor. After the update it jumped to 140fps! At first I assumed something horrible went wrong, image effects were disabled, quality settings were off, something. But nope. The performance increase was real. The actual build went from 70fps to 120fps. So I switched back to deferred rendering and re-enabled the SSR that I had disabled.Still getting over 100fps in the editor. I haven’t tested it in the build, but it’s sure to be well above 60fps.
What the heck did those drivers do for my card? Those numbers are a 70% increase. Normally you’d need to buy a new card to get those numbers. Even then you might not. The project just uses regular old DX11 because DX12 was actually slightly slower and had horrible tearing. I’d think the DX11 drivers would have been thoroughly optimized by now. I’m not sure how old the drivers are. Like I said, I hadn’t updated in quite a while. I sure wish I had now.
Only problem is my new baseline is significantly faster than someone who might also not have updated their drivers. Which makes it even harder to measure how the game will perform on other systems. Pretty small price to pay though. Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and it’ll be all slow again. It certainly feels like the kinda thing I usually wake up from eventually.
Unity are getting pretty big thes days. I wouldn’t surprise me if they are working directly with hardware manufacturers to implement Unity specific optimisations in their drivers.
nVidia and ATI both seem to just have randomly extra-bad releases sometimes. I can’t tell you how often I’ve had to fix my wife’s machine by downgrading her driver (she just lets them auto-update). Anecdotally I feel ATI breaks things much more often than nVidia, though.
I’m still running 372.54 (August 2016 I believe?) for my GTX 1070 as they’re spot on for performance. Anything later than that and several of my games start to have very weird issues…
I don’t remember what my old version was, I think it was 360-something. I ran the Unigine benchmark to see if that improved, but it didn’t do much good because I don’t remember what the original score was. The framerate was only 35 on the extreme settings, so even a few FPS would make up that increase. So it probably did improve. It’s not the first time I’ve upgraded the drivers and I don’t remember seeing any performance drops. But that could be because I was simply working on different projects. Now I’m scared to upgrade again if Substance Painter starts yelling at me about it again. Still, such wild variances in driver performance make it pretty hard to determine how the game will run on a given card.
Oh, man, you’re right. I’m seeing HUGE gains after updating. I tested with a sample project with just a couple cubes, windowed 720p on a GTX 1080. Previously I was getting around 2400fps looking at the objects, or 2800fps looking away (at nothing). Now with the latest Nvidia driver I’m getting almost 3200fps looking at the scene or 3800fps looking at nothing. This is major.
Just guessing here - that’s a mobile chip in a laptop, which means you also have an Intel Integrated GPU on your machine, am I right?
Maybe the mechanism in the driver that detects when an application should be using the integrated vs discrete GPUs was broken, and the driver update fixed it.
well, AMD is about to release some new hardware that might compete… why not boost performance with some optimized drivers. it’s not like NVidia releases new hardware with optimized drivers and stuff… like not.
Did you even read my post? Well if you don’t. In short. I compared unity versions 2018 and 2019. And how one of them is unstable on low end hardware. Even how new nvidia drivers doesn’t work in editor.
I do understand that. But there are thousands of thread in here. I’ve tried to look for answers in them. And my new thread will get deleted as well because someone might have already answered. Thank you anyway.
