Today, NVIDIA released Game Ready driver 522.25, which mainly adds support for the new GeForce RTX 4090 and day-one optimization for upcoming titles like Scorn (out in two days), A Plague Tale: Requiem (out in six days), Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection (out in seven days), and Gotham Knights (out in nine days).
However, NVIDIA also has a surprise in store for existing GeForce RTX owners. The new Game Ready driver delivers substantial DirectX 12 performance improvements in several games, such as:
- Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: up to 24% (1080p)
- Battlefield 2042: up to 7% (1080p)
- Borderlands 3: Up to 8% (1080p)
- Call of Duty: Vanguard: up to 12% (4K)
- Control: up to 6% (4K)
- Cyberpunk 2077: up to 20% (1080p)
- F1 22: up to 17% (4K)
- Far Cry 6: up to 5% (1440p)
- Forza Horizon 5: up to 8% (1080P)
- Horizon Zero Dawn: Complete Edition: up to 8% (4k)
- Red Dead Redemption 2: up to 7% (1080p)
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider: up to 5% (1080p)
- Tom Clancy’s The Division 2: up to 5% (1080p)
- Watch Dogs: Legion: up to 9% (1440p)
NVIDIA provided benchmark slides for three of the most popular titles in the above list: Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Cyberpunk 2077, and Forza Horizon 5.
As you can see below, the biggest improvements are registered at lower resolutions. It’s also interesting to note that the most powerful Ampere GPUs received a bigger performance boost than the lower-end ones.
NVIDIA was fairly vague when it comes to describing these DX12 improvements available with Game Ready driver 522.25, though it did say they include shader compilation optimization, reduced CPU overhead, and Resizable BAR profiles. Overall, the optimizations allow for better usage of your graphics card, particularly in CPU-bound scenarios.
As always with new NVIDIA Game Ready driver releases, the full release notes reveal some fixed issues, such as:
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[Teardown] Resolves lower performance observed when MSI Afterburner overlay is used
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Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands displays texture corruption after extended gameplay on NVIDIA GPUs
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UE5.1 crashes when enabling path tracing on some drivers
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