New GeForce Driver Delivers Huge Boost to DX12 Games

Megalith

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NVIDIA has supercharged DX12 performance with their latest GameReady 378.78 WHQL driver, which reportedly increases performance over 20% for titles such as Rise of the Tomb Raider (33%) and Hitman (23%). This release also unlocks support for the beastly 1080 Ti; you may check out the review for that here.

Those running DX12 games (under Windows 10) will benefit from driver optimizations which according to Nvidia will deliver an average performance boost of 16% across these various titles. The biggest gains are to be seen in Rise of the Tomb Raider, with a rather incredible 33% boost to the frame rate, and Nvidia also boasts that Hitman will get a similarly chunky 23% improvement. Gears of War 4 will be boosted to the tune of 10%, Ashes of the Singularity by 9%, and Tom Clancy’s The Division will get a more modest increase of 4%. Still, every extra bit of smoothness is welcome, as ever.
 
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Frequently, those "boosts" only affect the latest generation. Does this boost help the 980 Ti?
 
This sounds cool, but how many DX12 games are there? Will we ever see more DX12 updates for older games? probably not. So i guess in a year when current DX12 titles go on sale i will reap these new performance gains :)
 
Looks like it helps for DX11 as well; loaded up a save in Hitman and had 43-45 at one spot with 378.77, went to 48-50 with 378.78.
Edit: not sure how much of that was the reboot :)
 
>Those running DX12 games (under Windows 10)

umm.. is there any other way to run DX12??

LOL
 
Strange that this driver gets such a minor version number bump over the previous release. Was this "extra" performance simply some kind of bug fix, and not a years worth of nVidia technicians working hard on improving DX12 performance?
 
Strange that this driver gets such a minor version number bump over the previous release. Was this "extra" performance simply some kind of bug fix, and not a years worth of nVidia technicians working hard on improving DX12 performance?

It was 2 years with monkeys working moderately hard. They can't give a major revision unless it was humans. There are laws against that.
 
Will it improve performance in Ashes of the Singularity? That's the real question!

Ah! 9% Woohoo!
 
The press release graphs say "improvement since release."

It's just another driver release. Nvidia has just randomly decided to make everyone remember that there are slow improvements. It doesn't mean there are any improvements versus the last one.

dx12perf.png
 
Frequently, those "boosts" only affect the latest generation. Does this boost help the 980 Ti?

" *laughter* ..this fucking guy. " -nVidia


:)

I doubt it'd improve anything older than current gen. They may even go as far as making the improvements only activate on a newer card - I wouldn't put that past any hardware company. They want to boost sales of their modern hardware, not make it so last-gen tech has a little more life left in it.
 
The press release graphs say "improvement since release."

It's just another driver release. Nvidia has just randomly decided to make everyone remember that there are slow improvements. It doesn't mean there are any improvements versus the last one.

dx12perf.png

LOL, those framerates are terrible in the first place, for the most part.
 
Frequently, those "boosts" only affect the latest generation. Does this boost help the 980 Ti?
Yes!! I have a GTX980Ti, and when I played Rise of the Tomb Raider at 1440p I would have frame drops in DX11, and in DX12 it was worse. Now, I can only speak for RotTR, but my performance is much improved at 1440p in DX12. So much so, I'm playing the game again and with HBAO+, and everything else maxed out with the exception of AA. Even in the benchmarks, in the past this game would show single digit drops. Now, even the Soviet Installation I average 60fps and have a low of 45 or something so unbelievable before these drivers.
 
Yes!! I have a GTX980Ti, and when I played Rise of the Tomb Raider at 1440p I would have frame drops in DX11, and in DX12 it was worse. Now, I can only speak for RotTR, but my performance is much improved at 1440p in DX12. So much so, I'm playing the game again and with HBAO+, and everything else maxed out with the exception of AA. Even in the benchmarks, in the past this game would show single digit drops. Now, even the Soviet Installation I average 60fps and have a low of 45 or something so unbelievable before these drivers.
That's cool to know, thanks!
 
Strange that this driver gets such a minor version number bump over the previous release. Was this "extra" performance simply some kind of bug fix, and not a years worth of nVidia technicians working hard on improving DX12 performance?

Ahhh, now I see the reason for the small version number change, the performance claims for this driver are mostly nVidia BS. I would never have guessed...
 
) Figure averages the percentage increase of benchmark numbers in the following: GeForce GTX 1080 at 3840x2160 with launch driver 368.81 vs 378.74 on an Intel Core i7 5930K, 16GB DDR4 using Win10 x64. Ashes of the Singularity, Crazy Preset (46.5, 50.9 or 9%), Tom Clancy's The Division 1.6, Max Settings + 1x SMAA Ultra (31.5, 32.7 or 4%) Hitman, High Settings + High SSAO (50.6, 62.1 or 23%), Rise of the Tomb Raider, Very High + 2x SSAA (20.5, 27.2 or 33%), and Gears of War 4, Ultra Preset (41.2, 45.2 or 10%).

I can personally confirm the 9% in AotS Tomb raider has improved massively since launch but I don't have numbers for you.

Guru3d showed 11% improvement in hitman just comparing last whql and Anandtech apparently got 25% improvement in hitman on a 980ti.
 
I played it. It sucks. It's a crappy supreme commander knock-off.

i know i was being an ass and drawing attention to the fact that almost no one plays it, so putting your money into boosting it is just a benchmark bragging right, while not actually delivering performance where it could be more useful (4k bandwidth optimizations)
 
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