Hey Matthew,
I am by no means technically qualified, but hope I am good at testing and methodically pin-pointing issues (it’s called stubbornes). I was hoping you could fill the technical expertise to answer. Here is what I know so far:
I use 368.81 (which is truly old, July 2016). Please read this thread for more details about the behavior.
It gets more interesting: have you ever noticed how viewport render in Eevee seems to lag more and more as you do more navigating or change a couple materials, forcing re-renders? very common complaint in Youtube tutorials. Well that improves drastically if not totally goes away with the old driver (it may lag but rarely if ever gets stuck-crashes. The difference with the newer driver is very obvious).
Having read gamers’ forums this is typical memory leak behavior. A dead give away is your video RAM being still taken over (monitored by MSI Afterburner or other tool) after the crash - that doesn’t happen with old driver.
More reading suggested that memory leak may be the result of a combination of programs or more than one instances of the same program. MSI Afterburner was a suggested culprit, but I tried and that wasn’t it… then I found plenty references that NVIDIA’s very own GeForce Experience was commonly responsible!! and guess what : 368.81 driver installation does not automatically load GeForce Experience on startup, coincidence?
I will do testing asap to see if it’s not the actual drivers but the GeForce Experience loaded on startup.
-Christos
EDIT: no, I still can’t get newer drivers to perform well, even without GeForce Experience, not installed.
From the first few seconds, even the scrolling over the outliner list has some lag.
Eventually crash.
The crash leaves crap in memory and next when I try to restart Blender I get a message “1 device not closed”. Rebooting stops at black screen.