Is there really any performance benefit from updating graphics drivers?

Title, do video games in general ever benefit from updated drivers, or are they just cosmetic? Nvidia for example only mentions one or two games every driver update, if a game falls outside those two, does updating drivers do anything?

Yes and no. In general, the small beta increments of beta drivers can have a benefit. However, these benefits are focused on those consumers with the latest GPUs and/or gaming companies that have development contracts with the GPU manufacturer.

GPU companies focus on performance and their marketing does, as well. You arent buying the latest GPU for its reduced size or carbon footprint. You are buying it because it performs better than the one you had before. Once a GPU is shipped, they cant change the hardware. This means the only way to increase performance is to optimize the driver. GPU drivers are big and complicated and they look for ways to optimize the code and increase performance. They also fix bugs, as well.

Generally, these updates are almost always tailored to their latest GPU line, as that is what is currently selling on store shelves waiting to be purchased. The performance gains are minimal, but when performance matters, every little bit helps. Obviously, they want you to purchase the latest GPU, increasing the performance of an older GPU is counterproductive to that. So if you have a several year old GPU, there is little to no chance of upgrading drivers is going to increase performance. To add to that, there is a limit on how much optimization can be done. At some point, all the code related to performance has been gone over many times and nothing else can be done to improve it. Hardware has physical limitations and nothing can be done to bypass that. Once you have reached a certain level of performance and optimization, nothing more can be done.

These updates almost never affect older GPU models, unless the previous update introduced a bug. This happened to me within the last year, where a beta update from NVIDIA caused several games to stop working properly on my older GPU. Checking the forums, I saw other people had the same issue. I rolled back to the previous driver, which allowed me to play my games. A few days later, NVIDIA pushed out a new beta driver, which fixed the bug they introduced.

When NVIDIA announces their new beta driver increases GameX's framerate by 10%, they arent doing this out of the kindness of their hearts. GameX has paid NVIDIA to look at their game's source code and find ways to better optimize it for performance. Obviously, this makes the game run faster, but it is also good marketing for the game company and NVIDIA. Plus the game gets to put the NVIDIA or AMD logos on their marketing material and splash logos/videos in the game.