Nvidia Stutter

I recently updated the drivers for my Geforce GTX 275 from 190.62 to 191.07.  I was not having any performance problems.  I just updated because they were there.  Unfortunately there’s a problem with the 191.07 drivers and Champions Online.  Before the update, I was getting 45-50 FPS with all the settings maxed out.  After the update, I was seeing stutters where the FPS would drop to 10-12 for a few seconds at a time.  A few times the stuttering completely went away and a few times it was severe enough that I logged out of the game, but mostly it was just an annoyance.

After doing a few Google searches and checking the Champion forums, I decided to re-install the 190.62 drivers and hope that whatever was causing the problem rolled-back correctly.  I’ve been churning drivers so much recently with my new machine, that I even had the driver installation file still in my downloads folder.  There are a lot of detailed directions on the forums that include things like rebooting in safe mode and cleaner scans, but I didn’t do anything nearly so complicated.  All I did was rerun the 190.62 installation file and then go to the Nvidia control panel to verify the version number.  No reboot, no registry scan, and no uninstall of current drivers.  I’ve done a short play session in the same area of Canada where I was seeing fairly consistent stutters, and the problem appears gone.

So going forward, I’ll be holding off on any more driver updates, unless I find that I need them.