NVIDIA’s Latest Driver Improves Performance by 25% for RTX 30-Series Cards

NVIDIA's latest GameReady (v522.25) driver is here for all the RTX series of graphics cards. While it primarily adds support for RTX 4090 and the 4080 graphics cards, the new driver also claims to improve the performance of the RTX 3000 and the RTX 2000 series of GPUs. The latest driver update is touted to boost performance by 25 percent. Let's find out how NVIDIA achieved it.

The latest driver update for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series of graphics cards offers improves DX12 performance, especially on select titles like Assassin's Creed Valhalla and Cyberpunk 2077 which have received 25 and 20 percent performance gains at 1080p resolution. Similarly, the same games have received 16.7 percent and 13 percent performance improvement at 4K resolution.

• Assassin's Creed Valhalla: up to 25 percent (1080p)
• Battlefield 2042: up to 7 percent (1080p)
• Borderlands 3: Up to 8 percent (1080p)
• Call of Duty: Vanguard: up to 12 percent (4K)
• Control: up to 6 percent (4K)
• Cyberpunk 2077: up to 20 percent (1080p)
• F1(R) 22: up to 17 percent (4K)
• Far Cry 6: up to 5 percent (1440p)
• Forza Horizon 5: up to 8 percent (1080P)
• Horizon Zero Dawn: Complete Edition: up to 8 percent (4k)
• Red Dead Redemption 2: up to 7 percent (1080p)
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider: up to 5 percent (1080p)
• Tom Clancy's The Division 2: up to 5 percent (1080p)
• Watch Dogs: Legion: up to 9 percent (1440p)

How Did NVIDIA Achieve This?

According to NVIDIA's official blog, several improvements were made by optimizing shader compilation and reducing CPU overhead. Similarly, the new update also comes with an improved resizable BAR profile on select titles like F1 22 and Forza Horizon 5 to improve gaming performance.

Alongside these features, NVIDIA has also enabled DLSS 3 on Ada Lovelace RTX 4000 series GPUs, offering improved gaming performance on titles like Flight Simulator and Spiderman Remastered, which we recently reviewed.

NVIDIA's DLSS 3 is an AI upscaling technology that combines technologies like Super Resolution, Frame Generation, and NVIDIA Reflex to offer up to four times the frame at 2160p (4K) resolution. DLSS 3 claims to offer improved picture quality, lower latency, and higher frame rates on supported titles.

There are currently over 35 titles that already support DLSS 3 and users with laptops featuring a previous generation RTX graphics card can also get a performance boost on these titles as they are backward compatible with DLSS 2 Super Resolution technology.

DLSS 3 Makes Ada Lovelace Faster

If we look at the official figures shared by NVIDIA, at 4K resolution on Microsoft Flight Simulator, the performance of the RTX 4080 (12GB) is a tad bit slower than the RTX 3090 Ti when DLSS is disabled. However, with DLSS 3 enabled, the RTX 4080 posted 121fps while the RTX 3090 Ti with DLSS 2 offers an average frame rate of just 76fps.

This indicates that the hardware performance of the Ada Lovelace GPU is almost similar to the Ampere GPUs. By restricting DLSS 3, which is said to be based on software and hardware, NVIDIA is pushing users towards the latest and more expensive GPUs, especially those who want the best-performing graphics card.

The RTX 4080 (12GB) is priced at Rs. 87,000 in India while the RTX 3090 Ti costs a little over Rs. 1,00,000 in India. The RTX 4080 is clearly a better GPU here, and it is interesting to see that all this performance gain actually comes through a software-related feature rather than the hardware or the GPU itself.