When to upgrade graphics driver?

Question

I have a Radeon 4870, not latest gen but still serves me good. My question regards the driver version I use.
When the card just came out I used to upgrade whenever there was a release, sometimes even using beta drivers. Back then it made sense because the changelog indicated specifically that my card would get bugfixes and more importantly performance optimizations.

Today it is two years after release and the changelog doesn't mention my card anymore, only general bug fixes for my OS. I have began to fall behind on the updates, today I'm using a 4 month old driver and not feeling I should update my driver.

Should I update even though there aren't any performance increases and the bug fixes do not relate to me?

Answer 1

You could probably go your whole life and never update your graphic card driver unless it has a specific problem drawing some game or app.

I'd say you've updated your card more than 99% of the world does. So, no... you can stop updating now :)

Answer 2

I’m using the Catalyst drivers from Dec.2005 for one card and Feb.2010 for the other. No problem.

More generally, ATI tends to focus on their newest (read this month’s) cards. Once they drop support for a card, then there is no update at all. Even if they haven’t dropped a card altogether, they usually stop bothering to do any significant updates for older cards and only fix major issues (usually these affect newer cards anyway, so they’re not really fixing old cards).

Answer 3

Old thread, but just my two cents from today's lesson:

If you want WebGL support in your browser, you should update the drivers to meet some minimum requirements (I never bothered updating graphics drivers, so I had drivers from 2008 until today).

Here's the info for Firefox -- Mozilla said there were issues with older drivers so they blacklisted some of them.