Nvidia Releases Game Ready Driver For Oculus Rift, 'Dark Souls III'

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When Nvidia releases a new "Game Ready" driver, it's usually for a single, high-profile game. But its latest driver covers VR devices as well as a collection of new titles coming out over the next few weeks.

With today being the launch day of the Oculus Rift, Nvidia's latest driver—version 364.72—is optimized for the VR HMD. In addition, it also includes support for new VR titles such as Elite: Dangerous, Chronos and EVE: Valkyrie. The new driver version also includes improved support for the HTC Vive.

For those that don't own a VR headset, the latest driver also includes support for a short list of upcoming games such as Killer Instinct, which comes out tomorrow on the Xbox One and PC as a free-to-play title (although you will have to pay to buy additional characters). There's also support for Quantum Break, which launches next week, and the driver also adds an SLI profile for the highly-anticipated Dark Souls III. Finally, Nvidia's latest driver is also optimized for Epic Games' Paragon, even though it's still considered to be in Early Access.

With the Vive coming out next week, it's probable that Nvidia will have another Game Ready driver available next week. You can download the driver from the GeForce Experience app or Nvidia's download page.

Follow Rexly Peñaflorida II @Heirdeux. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.

Rexly Peñaflorida
14 Comments Comment from the forums
  • toddybody
    Will these one's allow me to "eject my GPU"...or will they instead cause some pronounced stability issues? Either way, thanks nVidia!
    Reply
  • agentbb007
    Cool, will Elite: Dangerous work in VR with the Rift?
    Reply
  • eltoro
    Prompt driver releases in time for game releases time and time again. Not only AMD is lagging in performance and feature support, but they are way behind when comparing the two companies driver releases. And yes, AMD suffers from driver bugs too, and from my experience even more than NVIDIA.
    People can keep talking about NVIDIA's general market conducts and unfair competition, but the fact is that they offer a better experience to their customers.
    Reply
  • ohim
    They should drop this "game ready" it`s a fancy way to say rushed beta driver to look cool to the fans, remember how they pulled the last "game ready" driver since it wasn`t that ready.

    17730579 said:
    Prompt driver releases in time for game releases time and time again. Not only AMD is lagging in performance and feature support, but they are way behind when comparing the two companies driver releases. And yes, AMD suffers from driver bugs too, and from my experience even more than NVIDIA.
    People can keep talking about NVIDIA's general market conducts and unfair competition, but the fact is that they offer a better experience to their customers.
    From my experience with my first ever AMD card i can tell you that AMD has very little driver issue and most people just talk to be talking, you can visit both Nvidia and AMD forums and see both companies have issue.

    "Game ready" is just an Nvidia fancy way to say "beta driver" that suppose to be working good with a certain game, note that the game can run just fine even without a "game ready" driver, this is pure marketing at core and it seems it has effect on naive people. Yes they fix some stuff in the upcoming titles but very little.

    As for performance , sorry to tell you but AMD hardware keeps it up for longer time, see 290 series still being relevant, most people don`t even talk about 7xx series from Nvidia.
    Reply
  • ohim
    And about people bashing Nvidia is not about how good or bad their hardware or drivers are, people are bashing them for the unfair Gameworks practice that technically cripples all AMD GPUs. There are plenty of gamer rants on YT explaining why Gameworks is cancer to the gaming industry, and this comes from people with actual Nvidia hardware.

    Most of the Gameworks stuff work only on GTX 980Ti anyway since the other lesser GPUs are too slow to actually have all the effects up, but all this is to block AMD from optimizing drivers for the game since they don`t have access to the Gameworks crap.
    Reply
  • quilciri
    Anyone else miss the comma and come here thinking "VR Dark Souls, wtf?"
    Reply
  • turkey3_scratch
    17730579 said:
    Prompt driver releases in time for game releases time and time again. Not only AMD is lagging in performance and feature support, but they are way behind when comparing the two companies driver releases. And yes, AMD suffers from driver bugs too, and from my experience even more than NVIDIA.
    People can keep talking about NVIDIA's general market conducts and unfair competition, but the fact is that they offer a better experience to their customers.

    Actually as of late AMD's drivers have been top-notch and Nvidia's have been a bit floppy. But neither are perfect, but just goes to show you it's totally subjective saying one or the other has better drivers.
    Reply
  • blppt
    "From my experience with my first ever AMD card i can tell you that AMD has very little driver issue and most people just talk to be talking, you can visit both Nvidia and AMD forums and see both companies have issue. "

    For single cards, yes, but for like the millionth time, CFX/SLI heavily depends on new driver releases for the latest titles, and up until very recently, AMD has been miserable in that regard.

    Likewise, I'm sure an older, verified stable Nvidia driver release would work with the newest games, but if you have multi-gpu, these game-day releases are necessary.

    Hopefully DX12 somewhat mitigates a new driver package everytime a new game comes out (for SLI/CFX), because installing drivers all the time is indeed annoying.
    Reply
  • ohim
    17731672 said:
    "From my experience with my first ever AMD card i can tell you that AMD has very little driver issue and most people just talk to be talking, you can visit both Nvidia and AMD forums and see both companies have issue. "

    For single cards, yes, but for like the millionth time, CFX/SLI heavily depends on new driver releases for the latest titles, and up until very recently, AMD has been miserable in that regard.

    Likewise, I'm sure an older, verified stable Nvidia driver release would work with the newest games, but if you have multi-gpu, these game-day releases are necessary.

    Hopefully DX12 somewhat mitigates a new driver package everytime a new game comes out (for SLI/CFX), because installing drivers all the time is indeed annoying.
    When people get multi-gpu setups they already know they will going to have a hard time, no matter if it`s Nvidia or AMD. And talking about SLI, it took Nvidia several months to get SLI working on Windows 10 while AMD users could use it without issues, i remember playing BF4 and seeing the few people that actually ran SLI complaining that they are o only 1 card since Nvidia had trouble bringing a new driver.

    As for the guy who said AMD is again behind the drivers just so you know AMD has a driver out for Oculus Rift and since the version number just changed from 16.3.1 to 16.3.2 it just shows it`s a simple addon to the existing driver itself but Nvidia seems to take their marketing lessons from Apple, trying to make it big with each minor update.. thus having "game ready" drivers.

    PS: for now i see tests with AMD GPU as primary and Nvidia GPU as secondary as the best option for multi-GPU rigs under DX12, i wonder how much time it will take Nvidia to bring a driver that will block this kind of use, you know.. just like disabling the PhysX in the drivers if an AMD GPU was found in the system.
    Reply
  • blppt
    "When people get multi-gpu setups they already know they will going to have a hard time, no matter if it`s Nvidia or AMD."

    No offense, but you are completely dismissing the currently vast gap of solid multi-gpu support between the two companies. For example, it is now almost month 5 and we still do not have a working CFX profile for Fallout 4, which is not exactly a low-selling indie release. Now, we can dump all the blame on Gameworks, but AMD did eventually get a solid CFX profile working for Witcher 3, and it didnt take 5 months. And while I dont expect to have perfect GPU scaling on day 1, Nvidia is much, much quicker at getting a solid M-GPU driver out for the latest titles.

    Also, if memory serves, they (AMD) had gotten a good, solid CFX profile out for the 1.2 patch of FO4, so we cant even blame Gameworks. Since that patch, which worked for a whole 3 days before the 1.3 patch was released (or however short it was) CFX has been a hitching mess on my two 290x(s). I think it was 16.2 or 16.3.0 in which they just apparently completely disabled CFX (by default) for FO4. Not sure why they re-enabled it by default for 16.3.2, since it is still unusable for me.

    BF4, was a mess all around---if you remember, it was developed as a flagship title for AMD's new Mantle API, which they couldnt get working for like 6 months after release. Not sure that's a great indication of Nvidia failing and AMD succeeding.
    Reply