NVIDIA has released the GeForce Game Ready driver 456.38, and it's a big one. Not only are there game optimizations as usual, this time for Fortnite's RTX/DLSS/Reflex update as well as Mafia: Definitive Edition and Halo 3: ODST, Game Ready driver 456.38 also adds support for the GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 graphics cards and a lot more. Riot's Valorant is getting the latency-lowering Reflex technology too, for instance, allowing for up to 33% reduced system latency.
The GeForce Experience software is getting updated with several new features, as long as you've opted into the beta by heading to Settings > General, and ticking “Enable Experimental Features”.
First of all, there's an automatic 'One-Click Performance Tuning' that can be used with GeForce RTX desktop graphics cards. According to NVIDIA, this won't potentially cause any system instability or visual artifacts, unlike manual overclocking.
This feature scans your GPU’s performance characteristics and automatically overclocks it, improving performance in games. Additionally, the Performance Tuner will perform regular checkup scans on your GPU to ensure you have the best tuning profile.
To use One-Click Performance Tuning, open the Performance Overlay (Alt+Z > Performance) and simply click “Enable automatic tuning”. GeForce Experience will begin to test your GPU over the course of 20-30 minutes, during which time we recommend letting your system idle, otherwise results may be affected.
Power users can also adjust voltage, power, temperature and fan speed targets, which will change the parameters used by our advanced performance tuning algorithms. This is useful if you wish, for example, to maximize performance without going above a certain temperature threshold, or want fans to spin at 70% max.
There's also an in-game performance and latency monitoring overlay that can be enabled through GeForce Experience. Users will be able to select between displaying a basic set of stats (FPS, 99% FPS, Render Latency, CPU and GPU Utilization) or a more advanced one. This tool will sync with the NVIDIA Reflex Latency Analyzer G-SYNC displays that will ship later this Fall.
There's more. Game Ready driver 456.38 enables HDR Game Capture through ShadowPlay. GeForce GTX 950-and-newer GPUs can record at up to 4K HDR (8K HDR on the GeForce RTX 3090, due next week).
It supports the brand new NVIDIA Broadcast app (downloadable here) as well as, in a world-first for a graphics card, hardware-based decoding of the AV1 codec on the new GeForce RTX 3000 series. The AV1 codec is capable of reducing video bandwidth requirements by up to 50%. If you've managed to snatch one of the few GeForce RTX 3000 graphics cards available at launch, here's how to enable AV1 decoding:
- Install Microsoft’s free AV1 Video Extension utility from the Windows 10 Store
- Use a compatible browser, like Google Chrome version 85
- Load AV1 content, which can be readily found on YouTube (8K HDR sample). Note: in YouTube’s Playback Settings page, you can request it to “Always prefer AV1”, ensuring AV1 is used whenever possible.
Five new G-SYNC Compatible displays have been added to the official compatibility list: Acer XV253Q GW, Asus VG27AQ1A, LG 27GN600 and 27GN800, and ViewSonic XG270Q.
Lastly, the following issues were fixed in Game Ready driver 456.38:
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[Batman Arkham Knight]: Enabling Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling on PhysX games results in lower frame rate.[2988376]
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[Call of Duty: Modern Warfare]: The game may intermittently see a drop in frame rate when ray tracing is enabled. [3050468]
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[Detroit: Become Human]: The game may crash. [3037846]
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[Forza Horizon 4]: Stuttering occurs in the game after racing a few laps. [3101001]
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[Horizon Zero Dawn The Complete Edition]: Flickering and texture corruption occurs in-game after setting Anisotropic Filtering to 16x from the NVIDIA Control Panel. [200638389]
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[madVR][MPC-HC]: Various HDR issues occur when using the madVR renderer with MPC-HC. [3038381]
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[Minecraft Java Edition;]: The game may crash when launched with XSplit Broadcaster running in the background. [3052464]
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[World of Warcraft]: Objects randomly flicker. [3101638]
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Video playback on the secondary display lags/freezes while playing a game on the primary display if Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling is enabled [200586262]
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[Notebook]: Display is not detected when connected to Thunderbolt 3 port on HP Spectre x360 - 15t-df100 Notebook. [3087076]
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[Notebook][NVIDIA Control Panel]: With Clone mode set, only the Developer pages are visible in the NVIDIA Control Panel after hot-plugging a DisplayPort/HDMI Freesync display. [200637570]
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[Notebook]: When a game is played on the primary display and a YouTube video is played on the extended display, video playback is sluggish and stutters. [200586262]
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[Pascal GPU][Marvel's Avengers]: The game may crash when switching windows [Alt+Tab] while the game is running. [3101682]
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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