Nvidia’s new Game Ready driver is ready for ‘Battlefield 1,’ ‘Titanfall 2,’ more

On Thursday, Nvidia released a new GeForce Game Ready WHQL driver for its GeForce graphics cards, version 375.57. As always, the driver can be obtained through the company’s GeForce Experience desktop client, or by heading to the GeForce website to download and install manually. This new driver is optimized for Battlefield 1, Titanfall 2, Civilization VI, Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope, and Eagle Flight. Yep, that’s quite a load!

According to Nvidia, Titanfall 2 developer Respawn Entertainment suggests that PC gamers use the GeForce GTX 1080 card for the ultimate experience, as it’s capable of running the game at a 4K resolution at 60 frames per second. If customers can’t afford the card, Nvidia suggests the GTX 1060 (starting price $250) given it can run Titanfall 2 at a 1,920 x 1,080 resolution at 60 frames per second.

More specifically, the Ultra specifications for running Titanfall 2 with a 3,840 x 2,160 resolution calls for the GTX 1080. The Recommended specs require a GTX 1060 running the game at 1,920 x 1,080 while the Minimum specs require the GTX 660 to run the game at 1,600 x 900. Despite all the talk about the GTX 10 Series cards, the game appears to be quite playable on older, lower-end models.

As for Battlefield 1, Nvidia recommends the GTX 1060 3GB card as well if customers want to run the game at a 1,920 x 1,080 resolution at 60 frames per second. The official recommended specs provided by Electronic Arts lists that very GeForce product along with the AMD Radeon RX 480 4GB graphics card. The minimum specs call for the GeForce GTX 660 2GB or the Radeon HD 7850 2GB.

The release notes for the v375.57 driver can be read in PDF format here. The notes reveal that Nvidia upgraded the quality of stereo VR by enhancing the performance and quality of “the motion vectors provided by the Motion-Estimation-Only mode of the video encoder.” The driver also updates the SLI profile for Lineage Eternal: Twilight Resistance, and adds/updates the 3D Vision profiles of Civilization VI and Titanfall 2.

As for what the new driver fixes or changes, there are three resolved issues with Windows 10 and only one resolved issue with Windows 8.1 and older. On the Windows 10 front, Nvidia addressed an issue caused in Mirror’s Edge Catalyst running on more than one installed GeForce GTX 980M chip in SLI mode. Also listed is a fix for corrupt decals in Overwatch, and a fix addressing a refresh rate change on BenQ ZOWIE monitors.

For Wis 8.1/8/7 customers, Nvidia addressed an issue that created dots on all characters found in Grand Theft Auto 5. This only happened on machines with the older GeForce GTX 650 card installed. Unfortunately, there is still a large number of issues that remain open on all platforms ranging from Windows 7 to Windows 10, so check out the notes starting on page 10.

Again, the quick way of staying up to date is to use Nvidia’s GeForce Experience client. Not only does it alert users of new drivers, but will optimize supported games, and stream those games to a Shield device. The drawback is that starting with version 3.0, Nvidia began enforcing a mandatory login, which really didn’t settle well with our readers and many Nvidia customers on a whole.

from Planet GS via John Jason Fallows on Inoreader http://ift.tt/2eugEVZ
Kevin Parrish