Nvidia boosts performance with Gamescom Game Ready Driver

Nvidia has released a new graphics driver, dubbed the Gamescom Game Ready Driver in celebration of the convention where it was unveiled, which it claims offers performance improvements of up to 23 percent in popular games while adding integer scaling and a new sharpening filter option.

Announced at Gamescom in Cologne this week, the Gamescom Game Ready Driver is claimed to bring considerable performance boosts over Nvidia's previous 431.60 stable driver build: The company claims a headline-grabbing 23 percent uplift, though this figure applies only to Apex Legends running at 1080p on a GeForce RTX 2080 Super graphics card; at higher resolutions, the uplift drops with 15.6 percent increase at 1440p and 8.3 percent at 2160p. The gains are also lower on different card models: The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is boosted by between 7.3 percent and 21 percent depending on resolution, the GeForce RTX 2070 Super by 5.3 percent to 16.9 percent, and the RTX 2060 Super by four percent to 15.5 percent.

These gains are also game-dependent: Battlefield V sees a maximum gain of 7.9 percent, again on the RTX 2080 Super at 1080p, with as little as 1.6 percent with the new drivers installed; Forza Horizon, interestingly, gains on the high-end cards at higher resolutions with between a single-percent gain at 1080p and a 15.6 percent gain at 2160p on an RTX 2080 Ti; Strange Brigade is boosted by between 0.6 percent and 5.6 percent depending on card and resolution; and World War Z gains between 1.9 percent and 7.5 percent.

Boosted framerates aren't the only promise Nvidia is making with the new drivers, though: The company has also added a new low-latency mode for just-in-time (JIT) frame scheduling, which is claimed to reduce latency by 33 percent compared to the company's previous best setting. The new driver also includes Nvidia's first attempt at integer scaling, designed to make low-resolution titles look sharper on high-resolution displays, though only on Turing GPUs; the GeForce Experience add-on software, meanwhile, comes with a new 'Freestyle' sharpening filter option. Finally, the update brings support for additional FreeSync displays and 30-bit colour support - previously only available on the company's professional-grade graphics cards and with the Studio Driver bundle.

More information on the new driver release, which is identified by version number 436.02, can be found on the Nvidia blog.