14 DAY TRIAL // Nvidia unveiled the special “Gamescom Game Ready Driver,” which is arguably one of the most significant updates we’ve seen in a long time.
Usually, new driver updates bring support for new games, for new hardware, and maybe better performance for existing games. Most of the time, the improvements are measures with a few percentile points, but this latest update doesn’t mess around. And the FPS improvements are somehow just a small part.
It’s clear than Nvidia has been working on this update for a long time because it comes with quite a few improvements that have been in the making for months. And, of course, it really helps if you have one of the RTX cards from the latest generation.
Low latency is the name of the game
The first things mentioned by Nvidia are the improvements made to a number of games such as Apex Legends, Battlefield V, Forza Horizon 4, Strange Brigade and World War Z, which increase framerates by up to 23%.
But the cool addition is the new Ultra-Low Latency mode that promises to improve gameplay not by providing more FPS, but by reducing the number frames in the render queue. It’s especially useful in games that are GPU-bound.
“The NVIDIA Control Panel has -- for over 10 years -- enabled GeForce gamers to adjust the “Maximum Pre-Rendered Frames,” the number of frames buffered in the render queue. By reducing the number of frames in the render queue, new frames are sent to your GPU sooner, reducing latency and improving responsiveness,” says Nvidia.
The company also announced called GPU Integer Scaling, which is useful in games like FTL, Hotline Miami, and Terarria. There are using retro and pixel art, which tends to become blurry at high resolution. The new feature corrects this problem by using a hardware-accelerated programmable scaling filter available in Turing.
The last item on the list is a new Sharpen Freestyle filter that comes with better image quality and performance, as opposed to the existing “Detail” Freestyle filter. This filter can be applied to more than 600 DX9, DX11, DX12, and Vulkan API games.
The new driver should be available through Gefore Experience right now. The announcement was made during Gamescom, one of the largest gaming expos in the world.