What do graphics drivers do to increase support for specific games?
Especially if they're made in an engine that has been previously optimised, for example.
Like, right now, my Nvidia Geforce Experience app is telling me to update to the "Game ready driver" for Diablo 4.
What is Diablo 4 doing so uniquely that it can't make full use of the general purpose firmware that is already there? Surely, it wouldn't have been designed in a way that would run poorly unless Nvidia made a new version that set straight their performance blunders, right? What are they doing here?
I suspect it is more along the lines of a new game heavily using some feature that wasn't as commonly used and then Nvidia going back to optimize it.
A lot of this. But also things like developers doing things in an inefficient way, which the driver can then optimise for.
It's not that game developers are intentionally not using GPUs properly, but the companies behind these GPUs are in a really good position to easily see if there's something that they can do on their end to improve performance with specific games.