Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “What Are NVIDIA “Game Ready Drivers?””.
If you’ve got an Nvidia graphics card, you may have noticed that the majority of their driver updates are labeled as game ready drivers, with the idea being that, in addition to Bringing General updates that benefit everyone, these drivers are optimized for a specific new game and are Released very near or even on the game’s launch day, but guess what, with a few exceptions, downloading the latest driver for your graphics card, probably isn’t going to give you a massive performance boost, even in that new game huh. So what are they? They actually do. Well, we’ll get to that, but first a quick history, nugget it turns out this misconception about performance goes all the way. Back to the days of the Reva TNT an Nvidia product. From 1998, there was a famous driver for the Reva TNT called Detonator that actually did boost performance significantly due to the inclusion of optimizations for AMD CPUs that previous drivers lacked.
This was great press for NVIDIA, but unfortunately it ended up setting setting an expectation that drivers would be some kind of Silver Bullet for performance issues. The issue with that is they’re, usually not, and a big part of the reason. It’S rare to see big performance jumps with new drivers. These days is that devs work closely with Nvidia, while the game is in development, this isn’t to say, you never see significant performance increases with new NVIDIA drivers, but it’s not as common as you might think, especially as tweaks to the drivers are often made with specific Games in mind well before launch, meaning that if you’ve updated your drivers with any regularity, there’s a good chance, your game will perform just fine, even if you’re not yet using the specific game ready driver for that game.
Nvidia has over an 80 % market share in the discrete GPU market, so it probably isn’t a surprise that they have plenty of contacts at Major game studios, there’s actually a regular Cadence, where Nvidia sends out pre-release drivers to developers on Mondays and from there there’s back And forth between the game developers and the Nvidia folks to get things to play as nicely as possible before launch day and while Nvidia can’t possibly test every single Hardware configuration they do have over 4500 combinations. They test that go all the way back to 2012. As of the time this video was shot in case, you were wondering this is how they figure out what the optimal settings for your PC are in GeForce experience, but enough context already what specifically about these drivers do they tweak before release? We’Ll tell you right after we thank the sponsor of this video hostinger building a website can be daunting, but hostinger can make things easy with their intuitive AI enabled features choose from 150 fully. Customizable templates then tailor them to suit your needs with AI powered, writing and picture making tools.
They even provide you with a free domain name. Free SSL and your very own email account what you can also work on your site on the go with their mobile site Builder, check out hostinger at the link below and use code techquickie to get 10 % off off, rather than pushing drivers to squeeze every possible Frame per second from an upcoming game, the general approach with game ready drivers is to ensure stability. For example, Nvidia has outright disabled resizable bar support for certain games, as it actually caused performance degradation with certain Hardware configurations, something that notably happened with Hitman world of assassination.
Where Nvidia turned off the feature on systems with Intel CPUs to prevent a performance hit, but if you had an AMD CPU in left resizable bar on because it wasn’t causing performance issues. That’S not fair! Not only that tweaks like this tend to be for an entire product stack, so, for example, if there’s a problem with an optional feature, that’s being seen with a lot of RTX 480s, it’s often switched off for the entire love lace architecture. Instead of creating a situation where that feature has to get retested on a per card basis for every subsequent driver release and of course, resizable bar is just one of a huge number of levers: Nvidia can pull dlss other AI features and the actual Cuda cores themselves.
All need to be able to support a massive number of games, which is part of the reason modern GPU drivers have gotten so huge. Your new game, ready driver has specific code describing how to behave when you’re playing this specific new game. Nvidia has actually tried to strip out unnecessary components to get driver sizes down from around a gigabyte to around 600 megabytes, which is still pretty gigantic and with all of those variables game ready, drivers still can and sometimes do cause issues even after extensive testing.
This is part of the reason. Nvidia also offers Studio drivers geared toward even greater stability for Content creators, which aren’t pushed out as frequently as game ready drivers. The issues that game ready drivers sometimes face are a possible point in favor of amd’s slower release, Cadence for its whql certified radon drivers and something that the two companies have publicly critici ized each other on.
Of course, AMD has also had issues with its drivers. At times with their anti-ag plus feature causing Gamers to run into problems with anti-che software in late 2023 standing out as an example, so slower cadences aren’t necessarily a perfect solution either, and the industry’s transition towards the directx12 API has actually shifted. More of the onus for getting things right towards the game developers and away from GPU companies. The intent behind this is to give Developers more control over their own game engines. But an unintended and common consequence has been that devs can violate the directx12 spec when they actually believe they’re following it. So I wouldn’t expect those hot fix drivers that Target a specific problem to go away anytime.
Soon. It’S not exactly like trillion. Dollar, companies can’t make mistakes hey thanks for watching that whole video like it if you liked it dislike it, if you disliked it check out our other videos, comment below with video suggestions and don’t forget to subscribe and follow. What are you doing here if you didn’t like the video .