Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is available March 10, and if you’re planning to pick up one of the mighty beasts, you’re going to need version 378.78 of Nvidia’s GeForce Game Ready driver. The latest driver is the first public release with support for the company’s top gaming GPU, DX12 performance enhancements, and further game support for Nvidia's advanced graphics technologies.
Even if you aren’t picking up one of Nvidia’s $700 graphics cards, you could probably stand to benefit from an upgrade to 378.78. Nvidia spent considerable effort refining Direct X 12 on GeForce GPUs. The company worked with game developers to improve performance in a handful of popular DX12-enabled games.
Nvidia’s marketing team will tell you the new driver improved performance in DX12 “by an average of 16% across five titles,” but take that claim with a grain of salt. The performance increase varies widely between games, and Nvidia’s statement is based on 4K performance, as the fine print on Nvidia’s table points out.
Rise of the Tomb Raider enjoys a dramatic 33% FPS increase when playing the game at 4K on max settings. But you likely wouldn’t play the game on those settings, because even though the performance went from 20FPS to 27FPS while running a GTX 1080, that's still a low FPS for a PC game. And The Division’s 4% performance increase is negligible, as it went from 31.5FPS to 32.7FPS, which would be utterly imperceptible.
Nvidia said that the new driver improves Vulkan performance on GeForce GPUs, but it didn’t give any specific performance metrics to back that statement.
A GeForce Game Ready driver wouldn’t be a “game ready” driver if it didn’t include support for a new release title. GeForce Game Ready driver 378.78 includes support for Ubisoft’s new open-world shooter, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands. The latest entry in the Ghost Recon franchise leverages a variety of Nvidia’s GameWorks proprietary graphics technologies, such as Enhance Volumetric Lighting, HBAO+ Ambient Occlusion, and Nvidia Turf Effects.
Ghost Recon: Wildlands is also the latest title to receive support for Nvidia’s in-game photography system, Nvidia Ansel, which lets you snap high-resolution screenshots of the game’s scenery from any perspective.
Nvidia’s GeForce Game Ready driver 378.78 is available now. If you have GeForce Experience installed, the driver update should be ready for you. If you don’t use GeForce Experience, the driver is available from Nvidia’s website.
