NVIDIA released GeForce Game Ready driver 526.98, delivering optimizations for Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales (out on Friday for PC), Warhammer 40,000: Darktide (out on November 30th, though a pre-order beta will be available starting tomorrow), and WRC Generations – The FIA WRC Official Game, which is receiving DLSS 3 support today with an update. The driver is also optimized for the World of Warcraft: Dragonflight expansion.
Insomniac’s Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales features the following features on PC:
- NVIDIA DLSS 3
- NVIDIA DLAA
- NVIDIA Reflex
- Ray-traced reflections
- Ray-traced shadows
As with all DLSS 3 games, it also supports DLSS 2 (now known as DLSS Super Resolution) for owners of GeForce RTX 20 and 30 Series graphics cards. Check out the latest trailer below and stay tuned for our own port impressions.
Warhammer 40,000: Darktide also supports DLSS 3 (and DLSS 2) and NVIDIA Reflex, in addition to ray traced reflections and global illumination. Check out a glimpse of the ray tracing in the footage below. As a reminder, Darktide Imperial Edition is currently part of an NVIDIA bundle for select GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics cards, provided that you purchase from select retailers.
One of the initial shortcomings of DLSS 3 was its lack of support for VSYNC, which is fixed by GeForce Game Ready driver 526.98. NVIDIA explained:
DLSS 3 uses its NVIDIA Reflex technology to limit the output frame rate to slightly below the refresh rate of the G-SYNC monitor. This enables tear-free gaming while avoiding large back pressure and high latency caused by VSYNC. To enable this feature:
- Enable G-SYNC: NVIDIA Control Panel –> Display –> Setup G-SYNC
- Turn VSYNC On: NVIDIA Control Panel –> 3D Settings –> Manage 3D Settings
- Use the Global Settings tab to apply the options in every game or on a per-game basis in the Program Settings tab
- Turn on DLSS Frame Generation in a supported game
GeForce Game Ready driver also quietly adds support for RTX IO (as part of the Microsoft DirectStorage 1.1 release, though it also works on Vulkan API through two new extensions) and for HDR10+ displays. However, neither technology is currently supported in any games.
RTX IO, as you might recall, was first announced two years ago. It is now finally available with this Game Ready driver. The technology is open source and works on all platforms but is optimized for Ada architecture and, therefore, RTX 40 GPUs.
Faster Load Times
RTX IO delivers near instantaneous game loading. Object pop-in and stutter can be reduced, and high-quality textures can be streamed at incredible rates.
Lower CPU Utilization
It offloads many CPU cores’ worth of work to your NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPU, delivering maximum overall system performance for next-generation games.
Smaller Assets
With lossless compression, game download and install sizes can be reduced, allowing gamers to store more games on their solid-state drive (SSD) while improving their performance.
Open Source
The GDeflate compression format will be open source, enabling developers to create ports and tools.
As for HDR10+, it is a royalty-free standard supported on Samsung 2022 TVs and monitors and other displays from Amazon, Panasonic, TCL, Vizio, and others. GeForce RTX and GeForce GTX 16 Series graphics cards are compatible.
Using our new NVAPI v2 HDR instructions, developers can add HDR10+ to their games, enabling compatible displays to take advantage of more accurate color and brightness reproduction.
HDR10+ is especially beneficial as games and other content can query HDR luminance and color information directly from the display to perform dynamic tone mapping that is optimal for each display’s HDR capabilities, helping to faithfully reproduce the artistic intent of content creators and consistently deliver great HDR experiences for GeForce gamers.
At CES 2022, Redout 2 was announced as the first compatible game, but that didn’t pan out. We’ll see if any game ends up being compatible, though the sad state of HDR gaming on PC doesn’t exactly leave us hopeful.
Last but not least, the GeForce Game Ready driver 526.98 release notes also mention the following fixed issues:
- G-SYNC logo is not displayed in the LG OLED TV menu when connected to GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs
- Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection may crash when launched on a GeForce GTX 10 series GPU
- [QNIX QX2710/Fujitsu Siemens SL23T-1/Dell UP2715K/ HP Z27q] Unable to select the native resolution of certain monitors from the Windows display settings
- [Daz Studio] Application crashes after updating to latest driver when trying to run simulation
- Desktop Window Manager (dwm.exe) service may report significantly higher GPU usage on certain PC configurations
- Maxon – Cinema4D + Redshift3D vidmemory allocations cause TDR or Driver Crash
