Not to mention that the quality of GPU drivers have been tanking lately, both on Team Red and Team Green. It's like a very bad throwback to 1997 where you need multiple driver versions in order to run all of your games. It's funny, I switched away from AMD partially because their drivers were getting kinda shaky, only for NVIDIA's quality to drop within a year. SLI certainly doesn't help matters, but I was having many of the same issues with a single GTX 680: periodic GPU driver crashes (which is a ROYAL pain in the ass when you're using HDMI audio, believe me). It only happens on certain games, but it does love to bite you in the ass. I don't know anyone with a newer NVIDIA card that doesn't have those from time to time. Assuming they haven't fixed this issue, try playing Metro 2033: Redux (I assume Metro Last Light: Redux, and possibly even the base Metro Last Light, have the same issues) with GPU PhysX. Enjoy the random black screens of frustration! If you're lucky you won't have to reboot your computer. The solution? Disable hardware PhysX.
Yeah.
With SLI enabled I find that it handles intense titles far better than older titles. I've never had a crash during FC4 or Crysis 3, but apparently my cards got so bored by the Mass Effect series that they would randomly crash the driver just so that something interesting would happen (i.e. they would listen to my frustrated wails via my headset mic). I had to disable SLI when I was playing through that series to resolve that (not that it mattered much, honestly; I'll bet my laptop's GTX 765m could render those games at 4K without breaking a sweat).
AMD, on the other hand, has really weird compatibility workarounds that cause things to break horribly. If you have a system with an AMD card, go ahead and try to play Wolfenstein: The New Order. I'll bet you get a whopping 10fps (unless they fixed that, and I highly doubt that they did). Now rename the executable and launch it again. Now it's suddenly playable! It's like magic only a whole hell of a lot more arcane. Driver crashes are less common, but they still occurred on my old HD 5830 from time to time (and far more frequently on my cousin's old HD 6750).
Ugh. BUT ANYWAY.
I do have to begrudgingly admit that Bethesda does have to take some of the fall for the gameplay bugs at the very least. They try so damn hard, but with a game of their usual scale it's impossible to iron them all out. That being said, I don't understand how people don't realize that by this point! Like I said before, I always wait a year for Bethesda titles for that very reason.
And honestly, I'm considering waiting at least a month or two after every AAA title just so that the driver situation can calm down a bit. That also gives me plenty of time to wait for the TotalBiscuits and Jim Sterlings of the world to play them and bash the port quality (if applicable).
