NVIDIA driver stability as of CUDA 9 or so has been craptastic IMO. I am seeing all sorts of strange slowdowns and app crashes that just weren't there pre-CUDA

NVIDIA driver stability as of CUDA 9 or so has been craptastic IMO. I am seeing all sorts of strange slowdowns and app crashes that just weren't there pre-CUDA 9. I would assume this is related to changes made for Volta support in some way, but who knows for sure? Where this hits the most is with end users of my 2 codebases who struggle to understand why things just stop working correctly. Each time (so far) it turns out to be shortly after upgrading their system to a post CUDA 9 driver/toolkit. The fix for now is simple since there's no consumer Volta GPU. Hope they get this straightened out. As for game-specific optimizations, I spent 5 years on the DirectX team writing those. I see those as part of the value-add of a HW vendor personally. But to your point, I also occasionally spent a week or 2 embedded with game developers to incorporate those optimizations into game engines with mixed results. When game developers refused to do so because reasons(tm), we occasionally overrode their intent within the driver because our reasons(tm). Old timers (2003-2005) might remember NVIDIA getting called out for this by HW web sites when the shader compilers could not come close to hand-optimized code. I never understood the fuss myself and I try not to work with the sorts who agreed with it. Life is just too short.