Nvidia released its Game Ready Driver 364.47 today, bringing with it a number of updates including support for new games and the Vulkan 3D API.
The new driver is optimized for running Tom Clancy’s The Division, Hitman, Need for Speed, Ashes of the Singularity, and Rise of the Tomb Raider. Although this driver should positively affect your gaming experience with any of these titles, some games received more attention than others.
The driver update adds new SLI profiles for Hitman and another game called The Technomancer. A third game, Zui Zhong Bing Qi (Ultimate Weapon), also received an update to its SLI profile. Starting with this driver revision, Nvidia does not recommend running its 3D Vision technology on Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, Far Cry Primal, Just Cause 3, Need for Speed or Star Wars Battlefront (2015), but it added 3D Vision support for Rise of the Tomb Raider.
A major feature included in today’s driver release is the support for the Vulkan 3D API. This API is being designed by Khronos Group as a competitor to Apple’s Metal, AMD’s Mantle and Microsoft’s DirectX 12. As it is in many ways a successor to the OpenGL API, it has sparked considerable interest among game developers and gaming enthusiasts alike.
Although there aren’t many games that currently use Vulkan, it is important that Nvidia is adding support now, rather than later when games do appear on the market. This will help attract developers using Vulkan to use Nvidia GPUs while working on new games.
There were a number of bug fixes implemented in this driver, too. Most of the bugs were on Windows 10, which had issues such as discrete GPUs remaining active even when not in use, flickering in certain display configurations, and a handful of problems with Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. There was also a bug fixed on all Windows OSes newer than Windows Vista that caused DirectX 9 games to stutter when using the driver override to force AA.
The driver is now available for download.
Update, 3/7/16, 12:15pm PT: We found user reports indicating that this driver is causing system instability and BSODs on Windows 10, but when we tested the driver ourselves, we didn't experience any instability issues.
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