Nvidia’s Latest Game Ready Driver Adds Support For 1080 Ti, Wildlands Features, DX12 Enhancements
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.
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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.
Kevin Carbotte is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware who primarily covers VR and AR hardware. He has been writing for us for more than four years.
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JackNaylorPE A great example of why readers need to read carefully what an article says before drawing broad conclusions .... lets say an article covering xx newish or particularly demanding games comes out and says ... well this card did well on the these 13 DX11 titles but the other card did better on 2 of the 3 DX12 titles. Are conclusions drawn that the 2nd card is the better choice today because DX12 "is the future" valid ? or...Reply
Is it possible that one vendor puts it's primary focus initially on the **now** tweaking drivers for the new cards and new DX11 game titles and pushed back DX12 driver development until having achieved their goals w/ DX11 and holding off on DX12 a bit until there were actually more DX12 titles available ?
Would it not be a wise strategy for a competing vendor, realizing its position w/ DX11 to focus on DX12 development so it could gain some headlines and mind share ? In the end it's all about the numbers .. and the numbers are what we can see today. Drawing conclusions about what is gonna happen based upon what we know today is a fruitless endeavor.
Drivers will get better on both sides as time goes on, devs will tweak drivers to get better performance and devs will cheat a bit too optimizing the driver for popular benchmarks. When it gets in a box, gets the latest driver, gets overclocked, then we'll know the performance a card is capable of at that time ... as for what's "gonna happen", Ygritte said it best ..."You know nothing Jon Snow". -
Overcl3cker i have one to and the performance its amazing !the new drive i not tes for now but in days i test full settings for see what performance gainReply -
Overcl3cker i try test soon i have one and not update now but the performance for games is amazing impressiveReply -
Regardless of this update...nvidia cards and drivers which makes those cards run good are great. Really enjoying SLI 1080 setup. Best gaming experience since forever...Reply
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s4fun The latest nVidia driver is garage. Installation failures all over the place on Windows 10. The nVidia core update refuses to install, and the geforce experience 3.4.0.70 fails to install. It does NOT matter if it is the standalone or the one packaged with 378.78 drivers.Reply