In line with its long-running strategy of releasing “Game-Ready” drivers that improve release-day compatibility of GeForce GPUs with games, Nvidia released the latest version, 397.31 WHQL, of the GeForce driver. The update is necessary for achieving best performance with the new games BattleTech and Frostpunk. As for other games, 397.31 also brings new or updated SLI profiles for Descenders, Warhammer: Vermintide 2, and Far Cry 5.
Diving deeper into the 397.31 release notes, we see that this is also the first version of the GeForce driver to support Nvidia’s RTX ray-tracing technology. The support is only for Nvidia’s Volta GPUs, and it’s still in the early stages of development. Also, AMD beat Nvidia at bringing Vulkan 1.1 support to its own GPUs, but Nvidia catches up in this driver release. Finally, those who use their PCs as home-theater devices might be interested to know that 397.31 brings support for 32kHz, 88.2kHz, and 176.4kHz sample rates to HDMI audio.
As usual, 397.31 also comes with miscellaneous bug fixes, which we’ve copied below.
[GeForce GTX 1080 Ti][Doom]: The game crashes due to the driver reverting to OpenGL 1.1 when HDR is enabled. [2049623][GeForce GTX 1060][Far Cry 5]: The game crashes after a few minutes of game play. [2096077]NvfbcPluginWindow temporarily prevents Windows from shutting down after launching a Steam game. [2068833][Firefox]: Driver TDR error may occur when using Firefox. [2049523][GeForce GTX 1060][Rise of Tomb Raider]: Flickering/corruption occurs when opening the in-game options UI. [200351146][NVIDIA Control Panel][SLI][Diablo III]: With V-Sync on and SLI enabled, the game freezes after switching windows (ALT+TAB) a few times. [1951584]
Starting with this driver, Nvidia has ended driver support for 32-bit operating systems and all GPUs based on the Fermi architecture. The GeForce 397.31 WHQL driver can be downloaded at Nvidia’s website or from within the GeForce Experience program.
