NVIDIA driver slowdown actually caused by Meltdown and Spectre updates

In a new video on YouTube, Tech YES City explores whether NVIDIA slows down old video cards with new driver releases. The YouTube channel investigated a claim that upgrading the drivers from GeForce 399.24 to GeForce 416.16 lowered the performance on a system with a GeForce GTX 1060 card.

The tester was unable to replicate the results, but after some digging he noticed there may be something else going on. The loss of performance was not caused by the NVIDIA driver updates, but by an external factor. In this case, the performance hit was the result of Spectre and Meltdown updates.

Basically, the performance slowdown was not planned obsolescence but the result of improper testing, where results from a pre-Meltdown and Spectre system got compared to results from a patched system. You can view the video investigation below.