Nvidia’s 436.02 GPU driver, which is the most significant GPU driver update in a long time, reportedly causes performance issues when playing games like CSGO (Counter-Strike: Global Offensive).
According to posts on Reddit, Nvidia 436.02 GPU driver reportedly reduces the FPS and some users have also benchmarked the before and after results to compare the impact of the update.
According to a user, the FPS benchmark with NVIDIA 431.60 driver was 329.95, but it has reduced to 267.75 FPS with the newest driver and low latency on, while the low latency mode is offering an FPS of just 232.30.
“I’m using an old GT650M laptop which is fine for casual gaming in 1024×768. Right above the comfortable 100fps mark. However one day for some reason my driver updated and performance tanked. Unfortunately I couldn’t remember the exact version I was on before so I had to try lots… one wonders what they do,” a user documented the problem.
“Before update it was average 200 and above (on same server). Very noticable once fps dips on a 240hz monitor, the tearing is super horrible,” another user noted.
It’s not just CSGO
According to other posts on Nvidia’s community forum (1, 2, 3), users are also experiencing performance slowdown when playing other popular titles.
“Theres some as yet unidenfitied performance issues in this new driver that nvidia need to work through, Dx12 has some sort of memory leak and quite a few DX11/9 games are not telling the driver properly what Prerender amount they want to actually use,” a user explained the other performance issues with the update.