It is not expected that newer display driver versions break older OptiX 7 versions.
The OPTIX_ABI_VERSION against which an application was compiled defines the OptixFunctionTable contents which in turn defines the version-specific OptiX API, so backward compatibility of the display drivers to older OptiX SDK versions is taken care of.
Though there is always a possibility that changes inside either the OptiX module or the underlying raytracing module of the display drivers affect how things work for any OptiX version, but always with the intent to improve the functionality and performance, not to break them.
Most changes usually happen between display driver branches and your description matches the timeframe of the R530 driver releases which in fact had some internal OptiX specific functionality changes, unrelated to the API itself, which inadvertently affected debugging and printf output. You’ll find related problem reports on this OptiX forum.
If you experience any issues with specific display driver versions, we would of course be interested to know about them as quickly as possible to be able to work with you on solving any such problem you encounter.
For that please contact us either via this developer forum or, when confidentiality is required, via private messages on this forum or the OptiX-Help email address you’ll find at the bottom of the OptiX download site.
To be able to file bug reports, we need as much information about the system configuration and the reproducer as possible, including:
OS version, installed GPU(s), VRAM amount, display driver version, OptiX SDK version (major.minor.micro), CUDA Toolkit version used to generate the input code, host compiler version.