[ronjouch]

Absolutely reasonable if your windows box is used for mundane web browsing / programming and the occasional video, but that doesn't fly for a gaming machine; some games will exhibit bad performance or will plain crash with old drivers that don't incorporate the regular fixes/workarounds added by nvidia (and amd does it too).

There's a youtube video I fail to find where a nvidia driver engineer explains how many games are terribly broken, failing to respect OpenGL/DirectX basics. Drivers hand-patch that, just like Microsoft hand-patch Windows for specific games "because compatibility" [1].

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

[alkonaut]

If you buy a game in october (Such as Battlefield 1) it wont even start if it finds your driver isn't the one shipped in October, together with the game. Basically AAA games these days are partly implemented in the drivers, and games have custom required tweaks for nvidia and and drivers.