Close Your Monitoring Software When Updating GPU Drivers!
Making sure your hardware is running properly by monitoring it is a healthy habit a lot of gamers have developed. This habit allows you to prevent catastrophic failures by stopping them in the early stages. Another thing gamers have picked up is timely driver updates to benefit from the latest patches and features that their GPUs are capable of.
With all of this in mind, it seems that always being on top of things might actually hurt your performance under certain circumstances, and here is how.
The Issue
If you properly uninstall and update your drivers manually this is not something you should be worried about since this issue happens only when updating drivers on top of each other.
The problem is noted to affect NVIDIA GPUs and the consequences are lower performance because of an incorrect power setting. This is the consequence of having a monitoring utility open while proceeding to update the NVIDIA GPU driver.
If you use EVGA Precision X1/MSI Afterburner, or any other overclocking/monitoring utility make sure to close them during the process of updating your driver. If you have the utility open, during the driver installation it might set a lower power target for your GPU resulting in lower performance since now the GPU has less available power to boost the clocks.
To check whether you have been affected and to fix this issue open your monitoring software and check the power target slider – make sure it is at 100% or above if you are overclocking your GPU. To avoid this issue completely use DDU to uninstall and NVCleanstall to install new NVIDIA drivers.
TL;DR
Make sure to close your monitoring utilities when updating your GPU drivers because there are cases where having them open sets a lower power target for the GPU. To fix/check on the issue open your monitoring utility and make sure the power target is set to 100% or above.