As the topic says i had several crashes and glitches when i upgraded from 441.87 to 456.55 . It was so bad i reinstalled 441.87 and the game worked perfect again. So if anyone is having trouble with NMS you might wanna try what i did if all else fails you.

i had a couple crashes to desktop and the screen would lock up on the settings screen if i changed any graphics or video settings. i could press keys and hear the game working in the background but i was stuck on the settings screen. i had to alt tab out then close nms and restart. the game seemed not to run as smooth also while i was using 456.55 drivers.

Anyway i just wanted to share if anyone else is having the same problems i was. i know everyone always screams update your graphic drivers first thing but sometimes that can bite you like it did me.

have fun and Don't Panic!

That's very useful, thanks for the heads-up!

Not having any issues with those drivers, had them installed for 3 days worth of No Man's Sky gaming without any problems ..

.. Though I only install the Drivers and Physx.
The HD Audio drivers and Geforce Experience I dont allow to install (Custom installation options). My machine has the correct sound drivers already, and additional installed sound drivers are known to cause problems for other games such as X4. Same story with anything that adds additional overlays, Geforce Experience, Steam, GOG Galaxy .. Everyone these days wants a slice of your desktop and game screens and they dont all work well together.

I upgraded from 456.38 WHQL to 456.55 WHQL

Card is a Geforce 1650

Release notes https://us.download.nvidia.com/Windows/456.55/456.55-win10-win8-win7-release-notes.pdf

All I install is the drivers and physx. i never liked geforce experience myself so i never install it or the audio drivers. the reason i went from 441 to 456 is i forget to check for updated drivers. i may try the 456.38 and see if it works. Either it or one of the others .

Try NVidias Installer Clean installation option, might help. But note if you have custom game profiles in NVidia Control Panel per game they will need redoing.

Sounds like you know enough to know this stuff, but I mention it in case its useful for anyone else too.

Something else about Geforce Experience for anyone reading, those game settings it will kindly suggest are crowd sourced from users, and not definitive for your machine.
Laptop users should especially note this, a laptop graphics card is not the same in its capability as a desktop card with the same model number .. So a mobile Geforce 1650 for example is not the same as a desktop 1650 - But NVidia's Geforce Experience will use game settings as if you had the full blown desktop card installed, and assist in slowly melting your graphics card. Don't trust Geforce Experience game settings recommendations on laptops.

Been playing with 456.55 for a few days now without any issues. Using a 1070 if that helps.

I choose the custom installation, installed the driver, physx and audio drivers. So everything besides Geforce experience. Installed and used the clean installation option, the audio drivers are needed for HDMI audio out if I remember correctly.

I had no problems when installing and running game a week ago with this new driver, except the cache files will be created new and the game wil stutter a bit after first launch with the dirver. I didn't have to change my grafic settings, but I will adapt the FPS limit to my monitor capablility if I plug an external one.
What I did was to deinstall NV Experience after installing the driver so I swat a useless service running on my computer.

I'm no sound expert so not sure really.

Maybe it's different for desktop motherboards, and the desktop graphics card handles sound throughput to the HDMI device plugged directly in to the back of the graphics card on the outside of the desktop casing?.

But my laptop came with RealTek HD audio drivers which are still supported and updated via Dell. If it needed anything more to support the laptops HDMI port I'm sure the manufacturer would include that in the default setup drivers.

Best to check in windows devices what sound device you have, and what drivers the machine originally came with to be sure.

I never have any related issues anyway, and the laptop sound works fine with its own dedicated drivers.
If the NVidia installer knows better than your machines manufacturer, could that be a bit misguided? <shrugs>

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I'm on 442.19, which seems to be one of the better drivers (3D Guru info etc) for the 1650 Super i use.

So pick the driver best for your GPU (this will usually be around the time of your GPU release plus a number of updates that focus specifically on your GPU version and bug fixing/performance improvements etc), and unless you have a specific game that NEEDS a new driver, and all your games work fine (or as good as they can if using the best driver for your card) then you are not forced to update just because a new driver is out.

That's my opinion on the subject, and it's served me very well for decades now (i still have an old XP based 9600GT system using a plus decade old driver as that systems games are all of the correct era for the system etc).

.. yeah but thats now a bit more involved due to Vulkan being a thing and bundled with Graphics drivers. If HG are tuning the games performance to be used with the latest release of Vulkan, which is now at version 1.22, you may be missing out on benefiting from that. Or maybe even .. The game could be trying to use features of a newer Vulkan API which are failing if you have the older Vulkan installed.

NVidia drivers 442.19 included the older Vulkan 1.1 https://us.download.nvidia.com/Windows/442.19/442.19-win10-win8-win7-release-notes.pdf

NVidia drivers 456.55 include Vulkan 1.22 https://us.download.nvidia.com/Windows/456.55/456.55-win10-win8-win7-release-notes.pdf

Though I dont know if the difference in more recent Vulkan optimisations in newer versions would result in any difference we would notice in the game.

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/blob/main/ChangeLog.txt

A huge amount of work has been done between 1.1 and 1.22

Now that the game is dependant on this new API, I should imagine Hellogames are refining the game engine and taking advantage of Vulkan developments seeing as it is still a relatively new API No Man's Sky has adopted ( August 2019 Beyond release https://www.nomanssky.com/2019/08/no-mans-sky-beyond-release/ ), prior to that it was using OpenGL ( or rather, it was prior to the Vulkan Beta on the experimental branch, which came just before Beyond ).

Did you mean 442.19 here? (as those were the ones i mentioned using?). Vulcan does make things a little more complex (as it is super new) and NMS is all about that now (shame not more games are using it too imho).

In relation to that, Synthesis 2.27 runs extremely well on that 442.19 driver. With all settings to Max (as in ultra) in game settings AND Nvida settings to force more or less max quality (x8 anti-alising etc), i easily hit a solid 60fps (i max it out at that) even when recording gameplay (this is on a 4GB 1650 Super).

Compared to OpenGL and how those numbers looked in NMS previously, i can see Vulcan is a huge improvement, even if on older versions of it. So in my case it very much is a case of "it ain't broke, so i have nothing to fix". 442.19 will be staying on my system for the time being.

:) Yep, thank you for spotting that, I have amended the post, the release notes link for the same remains correct

If nothing seems to be broken and you are happy, that's your prerogative of course, and especially being on such an older version of the game it will be much less of a concern.

I am just trying to give other readers of these posts more detail to make more informed decisions for themselves if they are current with game updates.

456.71 is out, might be worth a shot for the OP

Apparently it also fixes 4 security vulnerabilities according to reddit ..

https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/j6qgz8/game_ready_driver_45671_faqdiscussion/

"According to NVIDIA September Security Bulletin, this driver also contains fixes to 4 security vulnerabilities.

CVE‑2020‑5980

CVE‑2020‑5979

CVE‑2020‑5981

CVE‑2020‑5982"