A few days later, NVIDIA pushed out a new beta driver, which fixed the bug they introduced. I rolled back to the previous driver, which allowed me to play my games. Checking the forums, I saw other people had the same issue.

This happened to me within the last year, where a beta update from NVIDIA caused several games to stop working properly on my older GPU. These updates almost never affect older GPU models, unless the previous update introduced a bug. Once you have reached a certain level of performance and optimization, nothing more can be done. Hardware has physical limitations and nothing can be done to bypass that. At some point, all the code related to performance has been gone over many times and nothing else can be done to improve it. To add to that, there is a limit on how much optimization can be done. So if you have a several year old GPU, there is little to no chance of upgrading drivers is going to increase performance. Obviously, they want you to purchase the latest GPU, increasing the performance of an older GPU is counterproductive to that. The performance gains are minimal, but when performance matters, every little bit helps. Generally, these updates are almost always tailored to their latest GPU line, as that is what is currently selling on store shelves waiting to be purchased.

GPU drivers are big and complicated and they look for ways to optimize the code and increase performance. This means the only way to increase performance is to optimize the driver. Once a GPU is shipped, they cant change the hardware. You are buying it because it performs better than the one you had before. You arent buying the latest GPU for its reduced size or carbon footprint. GPU companies focus on performance and their marketing does, as well. However, these benefits are focused on those consumers with the latest GPUs and/or gaming companies that have development contracts with the GPU manufacturer. In general, the small beta increments of beta drivers can have a benefit.

Updating nvidia graphics card