Nvidia's newest GPU driver gets your PC ready for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare

There's a new "Game Ready" driver from Nvidia available for owners of GeForce graphics cards, and with it comes optimizations for the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare reboot that's due out in just a few days. The new GeForce 440.97 WHQL driver release is also tuned for The Outer Worlds.

Both games are slated to release globally on Friday, October 25 (Modern Warfare will actually launch on October 24 in the US, at precisely 6:00 pm PT / 9:00 pm ET). Understandably, Nvidia is especially focused on Modern Warfare, which will arrive with support for real-time ray tracing, a stable of the company's GeForce RTX series graphics cards (technically, Nvidia's GeForce GTX cards based on Turing also support ray tracing, but lack dedicated hardware to make it feasible in most cases).

"Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is poised to reset the bar upon release this October," said Matt Wuebbling, head of GeForce marketing at Nvidia. "Nvidia is proud to partner closely with this epic development and contribute toward the creation of this gripping experience. Our teams of engineers have been working closely with Infinity Ward to use Nvidia RTX technologies to display the realistic effects and incredible immersion that Modern Warfare offers."

Infinity Ward echoed Nvidia's statement in one of its own.

"Our work with Nvidia GPUs has helped us throughout the PC development of Modern Warfare," said Dave Stohl, co-studio head at Infinity Ward. "We’ve seamlessly integrated the RTX features like ray tracing and adaptive shading into our rendering pipeline. It’s been a great addition to our existing technology, and we look forward to our PC fans experiencing it for themselves very soon."

Looking past the specific game optimizations, the 440.97 driver release extends G-Sync support to windowed OpenGL and Vulkan applications. It also addresses a handful of issues, including:

• [FIFA 19/FIFA 20]: The game may crash to the desktop.
• [Apex Legends]: Random flickering occurs on the screen.
• [Star Wars: Battlefront II]: Random crashes to the desktop occur.
• [Growtopia][GeForce RTX]: The game crashes when launched.
• [Tradesmen OS3DE]: Objects are missing in the game.
• [World of Warcraft]: Flickering occurs on the character select screen.
• [Cinema 4D]: Trailing ghosting effect appears when moving the brush tool. 
• [Shadow Of The Tomb Raider][DirectX 12]: The game crashes after hitting a TDR error.
• [Forza Horizon 4]: Colored corruption appears in the game during gameplay. 
• [Notebook][GeForce GTX 970M]: GPU clock cannot be boosted beyond base clock speed.

There are a couple of known issues as well. Specifically, Grand Theft Auto V "frequently crashes," and in Battlefield V, "when G-Sync and HDR are enabled, the game cannot be maximized to full-screen after being minimized to the taskbar," Nvidia states in the release notes.

You can grab the latest driver release through GeForce Experience or by going here. Also be sure to check out our guide on how to update drivers.