Today, NVIDIA released Game Ready driver 522.25, which mainly adds support for the new GeForce RTX 4090 and day-one optimization for upcoming titles like Scorn (out in two days), A Plague Tale: Requiem (out in six days), Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection (out in seven days), and Gotham Knights (out in nine days).
However, NVIDIA also has a surprise in store for existing GeForce RTX owners. The new Game Ready driver delivers substantial DirectX 12 performance improvements in several games, such as:
- Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: up to 24% (1080p)
- Battlefield 2042: up to 7% (1080p)
- Borderlands 3: Up to 8% (1080p)
- Call of Duty: Vanguard: up to 12% (4K)
- Control: up to 6% (4K)
- Cyberpunk 2077: up to 20% (1080p)
- F1 22: up to 17% (4K)
- Far Cry 6: up to 5% (1440p)
- Forza Horizon 5: up to 8% (1080P)
- Horizon Zero Dawn: Complete Edition: up to 8% (4k)
- Red Dead Redemption 2: up to 7% (1080p)
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider: up to 5% (1080p)
- Tom Clancy’s The Division 2: up to 5% (1080p)
- Watch Dogs: Legion: up to 9% (1440p)
NVIDIA provided benchmark slides for three of the most popular titles in the above list: Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Cyberpunk 2077, and Forza Horizon 5.
As you can see below, the biggest improvements are registered at lower resolutions. It's also interesting to note that the most powerful Ampere GPUs received a bigger performance boost than the lower-end ones.
NVIDIA was fairly vague when it comes to describing these DX12 improvements available with Game Ready driver 522.25, though it did say they include shader compilation optimization, reduced CPU overhead, and Resizable BAR profiles. Overall, the optimizations allow for better usage of your graphics card, particularly in CPU-bound scenarios.
As always with new NVIDIA Game Ready driver releases, the full release notes reveal some fixed issues, such as:
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[Teardown] Resolves lower performance observed when MSI Afterburner overlay is used
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Tiny Tina's Wonderlands displays texture corruption after extended gameplay on NVIDIA GPUs
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UE5.1 crashes when enabling path tracing on some drivers
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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