Along with the brand new RTX 4090, Nvidia released a new driver as you'd expect. The 522.25 driver doesn’t just add RTX 4090 support, but also brings a range of feature and performance updates for RTX 30 series cards as well.
According to a post over at Nvidia’s website, the driver brings some significant DirectX 12 performance improvements for GeForce RTX GPUs. Though the post only talks about RTX 30 cards, presumably some of these benefits apply to RTX 20 cards as well.
Many of the gains are small, but some, like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (1080p) and Cyberpunk 2077 (1080p) deliver 24% and 20% gains respectively. That’s seriously impressive.
According to Nvidia, the improved performance is due to a combination of shader compilation optimization, reduced CPU overhead, and Resizable BAR profiles for some games including Forza Horizon 5 and F1 22. In the case of F1 22, performance increases are up by 17% at 4K. The reduction in CPU overhead appears to deliver gains in CPU-bound scenarios, which are more likely at 1080p.
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The driver also introduces DLSS 3.0 support. Five games have DLSS 3.0 support now, including Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered and Bright Memory: Infinite, with many more to follow, including F1 22 and Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Nvidia refers to its driver releases as ‘game ready’, and they include optimizations and support for newly released games. The newest release includes support for Gotham Knights, Scorn and Uncharted: legacy of Thieves Collection.
Of course, the new driver supports the mighty RTX 4090. It’s fast and powerful, but also expensive. Check out our RTX 4090 review.
This is the kind of driver that’s well worth downloading. Who doesn’t love free performance? Head over to the Nvidia website if you’re keen to try out this new driver.
