Glossary/System/Driver version drift
Driver version drift
Driver version drift is performance changing between graphics driver releases, which makes results incomparable unless the driver version is recorded.
Also known as driver drift, driver regression
Not measurable from a browser
A browser cannot read temperatures, power draw, fan speed, VRAM capacity, clock frequency or native FLOPS. For a direct reading use a native monitor such as HWiNFO64, GPU-Z or lm-sensors. SystemCheck contributes the other half: whether the condition is costing you throughput, measured as decay and consistency.
Driver releases change shader compilers, scheduling, memory management, and per-application optimisation profiles. Most changes are improvements or neutral, but regressions of 5-15% in specific workloads do ship and sometimes persist for several releases before being fixed.
The consequence for measurement is that a benchmark comparison is only valid within a known driver version. A user comparing today's result against one from a year ago is measuring the driver as much as the hardware, and a mysterious slowdown after a routine update is a genuinely common story.
Record your driver version with every baseline, and if performance drops after an update, roll back to confirm before chasing hardware causes. Browser version matters too for a web benchmark. The JavaScript engine, ANGLE, and the WebGPU implementation all evolve. SystemCheck stamps each report with its measurement revision and GPU backend; note your driver and browser version alongside it so a saved baseline stays interpretable.
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