I have a gtx260m, that thing came out in ~2009. It still get drivers update regularly...

Im suppose to believe nvidia have ppl working on almost 10 years old cards? How does that works?

Are these drivers making any difference for such an old card? What exactly are these updatings doing?

Release notes for latest driver:

This driver adds security updates for driver components of Tesla architecture class

GPUs

Changes and Fixed Issues in Version 342.01
The following sections list the important changes and the most common issues resolved
since version 342.00. This list is only a subset of the total number of changes made in this
driver version. The NVIDIA bug number is provided for reference.
Windows 10 Fixed Issues
There were no issues to report for this version.
Windows Vista / Windows 7 / Windows 8 / Windows 8.1 Fixed Issues
There were no issues to report for this version.

http://uk.download.nvidia.com/Windows/342.01/342.01-win10-win8-win7-notebook-release-notes.pdf

Literally is doing noting?

There is a pretty good chance that the driver updates change nothing for your card. I've noted several cases in which new driver releases cause older cards to behave worse. Even though the website makes you select your specific GPU before showing you a driver version, nobody is putting that much thought in for each card/chip behind the scenes. That's only there for a few special cases where they want to roll drivers out to specific GPUs first, or keep specific drivers off specific GPUs for some reason. Most everything else will get the same driver otherwise.

While there is a passing possibility that an occasional bug for these older cards pops up and gets fixed, it's very unlikely. Some bugs may affect the driver itself and/or all NV chips.

Lots of driver code is actually quite high level, concerning the way that GL/D3D are implemented in terms of resource management and command management, which is hardware agnostic code.

That's also one part of the driver that they re-optimize for every different AAA game. When you see patch notes saying "increased perf in <Game> by 15%“ it's because they've written lots of custom driver code that only gets loaded for that particular game and is optimised for the specific ways that it uses D3D/GL.

Lots of driver code is actually quite high level, concerning the way that GL/D3D are implemented in terms of resource management and command management, which is hardware agnostic code.

That's also one part of the driver that they re-optimize for every different AAA game. When you see patch notes saying "increased perf in <Game> by 15%“ it's because they've written lots of custom driver code that only gets loaded for that particular game and is optimised for the specific ways that it uses D3D/GL.

I've heard that before and I feel for the poor driver programmers. That must be the worst pile of spaghetti code in history!

It makes me quite angry actually - I get nagged to install updated drivers every few days, for changes that will almost certainly not benefit me at all, and possibly will break things.

I've heard that before and I feel for the poor driver programmers. That must be the worst pile of spaghetti code in history!

Oh, it is - per-game/benchmark "hacks" probably make up the majority of the driver code by quite a wide margin these days.
That is largely down to the APIs however not allowing the games to clearly indicate what they are doing.

It is interesting to note that, on NV hardware, DX12/Vulkan games where the driver can't do clever stuff in one or more 'server' threads are pretty much on par with the "optimised" driver hackery they do for DX11/OpenGL games.
(AMD is a different matter, but they haven't put has much time in to their driver hackery due to resource constraints - in that case the DX12/Vulkan paths pretty much murder the DX11/OpenGL ones for newer games...)