Especially if they’re made in an engine that has been previously optimised, for example.
Like, right now, my Nvidia Geforce Experience app is telling me to update to the “Game ready driver” for Diablo 4.
What is Diablo 4 doing so uniquely that it can’t make full use of the general purpose firmware that is already there? Surely, it wouldn’t have been designed in a way that would run poorly unless Nvidia made a new version that set straight their performance blunders, right? What are they doing here?
I suspect it is more along the lines of a new game heavily using some feature that wasn’t as commonly used and then Nvidia going back to optimize it.
That’s my guess as well. I doubt Nvidia is adding special logic or optimizations for every new game. The whole “drivers made ready for Diablo 4” thing is likely more for marketing than anything.
Only major gaming studios would have enough reputation to get Nvidia to do anything, but it is also in Nvidias best interest to focus on updates involving the biggest selling games. Both for advertisement purposes and to direct their work. They can put in the least effort for the maximum outcome.
A lot of this. But also things like developers doing things in an inefficient way, which the driver can then optimise for.
It’s not that game developers are intentionally not using GPUs properly, but the companies behind these GPUs are in a really good position to easily see if there’s something that they can do on their end to improve performance with specific games.