Why a fresh driver breaks what worked
Game Ready and Adrenalin releases tune for current AAA titles, and chasing those gains means adjusting shader compilers and power-management logic. The side effect is regressions in older engines, artifacts, crashes, or stutter in your particular game, often in esports titles and emulators. On brand-new GPU architectures the first drivers are frequently rough, while on previous-generation cards a new release usually adds little — though it can still introduce a bug.
How to confirm the driver is the culprit
Capture the numbers before and after: average and 1% low FPS, and above all how smooth the frametime feels. The in-game counter and MSI Afterburner's overlay show FPS and frametimes, while 1% lows are easiest to measure in tools like CapFrameX or PresentMon. Compare the same scene at the same settings, or the numbers mean nothing. If drops or crashes started right after an update and the driver's release notes say nothing about your game, that's a strong sign the driver is to blame rather than the title itself.
What to actually do
Don't install on day one if your current driver is fine — the rule is simple: if it runs and the frame rate is good, leave it. When you do update for a specific new release, first read what the notes claim to fix and check for fresh complaints about your exact card model. Keep the installer for a known-good version on hand so you can roll back. For a problem rollback, do a clean install — use the installer's 'clean install' option, or DDU in Safe Mode for stubborn cases — and do it carefully or have someone experienced handle it, since leftovers from an old version can clash with the new one.
Verdict
The newest driver isn't harmful by default, but it isn't the goal either: the upside is often just a couple of percent in one game, while the cost of a bad one is crashes in another. Update deliberately — for a specific game or to fix a problem you actually have — and always keep a way back to the version you know worked.