Nvidia preps its CES 2020 Game Ready Driver – New Features for Geforce users
Nvidia preps its CES 2020 Game Ready Driver – New Features for Geforce users
Nvidia has revealed its first major Geforce driver release of 2020, delivering gamers new features, Game Ready support for a new RTX title and support for eight new G-Sync Compatible displays.Â
While this driver has no firm release date, it is likely to release over the coming days, bringing with it new VR features, battery-saving additions and a VR enhancing variant of variable rate shading.Â
For starters, Nvidia’s CES driver will contain a new “Max Framerate” setting within their driver control panel. This will allow gamers to limit the framerate of their games to reduce power draw and reduce some instances of system latency. Limiting a game’s framerate can help minimise the length of time a title is CPU limited, something which can cause latency spikes. Furthermore, limiting framerates will prevent systems from running at 100% loads in many cases, reducing power draw.Â
Nvidia’s Max Framerate feature is most useful in Nvidia powered notebooks, where framerate limits can conserve battery life, but the feature can also be useful for esports gamers who wish to optimise their system latencies.Â
Next up, Nvidia has confirmed that Wolfenstein: Youngblood will gain support for both raytraced reflections and Deep-Learning Supersampling (DLSS) in an upcoming patch. These features will help Wolfenstein: Youngblood both look better and run at higher framerates, respectively.Â
This driver also contains an update to Nvidia’s Image Sharpening tool which allows for image scaling without sharpening and support for custom resolutions.Â
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Another neat feature for Nvidia’s drivers is support for Variable Rate SuperSampling, which is a feature which allows VR games to utilise a form of dynamic downscaling/supersampling to deliver high-quality visuals with a lower performance cost than a 4x supersample.Â
This feature allows the centre of a VR game to utilise shading rates that are up to 8x higher than normal; while coming with a performance cost that’s much lower than full 4x supersamples. What Nvidia promises is higher levels of graphical fidelity, and relatively low performance drops. This feature only works on around 24 DirectX 11 VR games. At this time it is unknown how Nvidia implemented this feature, or how many VR titles it supports. This feature is likely to be exclusive to Nvidia’s Turing series graphics cards.
With the next-generation of consoles coming at the end of 2020, Nvidia has been quick to remind PC users that “PC gaming is thriving”, citing the push for raytracing, the growth of esports and high VR sales growth as proof. The question now is how Sony/Microsoft’s next-generation consoles will impact PC gaming moving forward.Â
Nvidia’s Geforce CES 2020 driver is due to release later this week. We will update this article when it releases.Â
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