I’ll be playing a game, and then one day it won’t work. After updating my graphics drivers, it works again. But the game didn’t receive an update, so why does it just break?
I’ll be playing a game, and then one day it won’t work. After updating my graphics drivers, it works again. But the game didn’t receive an update, so why does it just break?
Modern, performant computer graphics is an incredibly complex topic full of hacks, workarounds, and edge cases. It’s possible that an update to DirectX/OpenGL/Vulkan caused some edge case interaction between the application and the graphics pipeline to fail somewhere. Updating the GPU driver (mesa, nvidia, amdgpu, or whatever Windows equivalent) could mitigate that failure.
I remember having to update the Nvidia Windows driver when Cyberpunk 2077 was released to fix an issue related to transparent foliage (transparency is always a pain in the ass to deal with).
That’s always what I thought when they release a new driver for a specific game. I’m like “seriously? Do they check the executable or something?” Yes, yes they do.
Other things that have been broken by one update and fixed by new drivers were shadows in Oblivion not rendering and Arkham Asylum crashing at a specific moment if physx was anabled.