New Gamescom Driver from Nvidia Promises Better Performance and Better Pixels

Not content to follow all the tracks of Minecraft and many other great games such as Call of Duty and Watch Dogs Legion this week, Nvidia also released yesterday a new GeForce Game Ready driver that promises up to 23% better performance in some of the big multiplayer games of today. games, plus sharper pixels in retro games (see FTL: Faster Than Light in 4K, up there). Or at least if you have a Nvidia RTX or GTX 16 card, like our best graphics card champion, the GTX 1660 Ti, because many new driver benefits are all tied to Nvidia's new Turing architecture. The old owners of graphics cards are a little fuzz.

Let's start by discussing pretty pixels. You probably have never had a problem with this if you have a 1080p gaming monitor, but if you've ever played a retro game or pixel art on a higher resolution screen, such as a 1440p monitor or 4K TV, you may have found that it does not seem so clear. This is because games sometimes use an element called upscaling to blow up lower resolution images to fit your high-resolution screen, resulting in blurred edges and a blurred image. Sometimes. Most of the modern pixel art games I've encountered recently have generally been able to have their own high-resolution resources available in their graphics options, but this is not always the case for pixel-based games. older.

To help combat the aforementioned fuzz, card owners of the Nvidia RTX and GTX 16 Series will now find an entire resize option available from the View menu "Adjust Desktop Size and Position" in their Nvidia Control Panel. According to Nvidia, it is still in beta, but it should help preserve this extra level of detail with the hardware acceleration scaling filters available in the Nvidia Turing GPU, which is at the heart of their RTX family and GTX 16.

Fortunately, Nvidia's Game Ready driver has added a new add-on that should help do the same thing by improving the sharpness of images for everyone else. This is part of the Nvidia FreeStyle overlay in their GeForce Experience app, which will now include a new FreeStyle Sharpness filter in their existing Details filter. Here it is in action:

The performance of your game will suffer a little, but Nvidia promises that the impact on performance is about half that of the previous sharpness filter. You can also choose your own level of sharpness, between 0 and 100%, and apply it game by game. In case you forget it, here are all the games that support the application FreeStyle of Nvidia.

Then let's talk about performance improvements. Of course, it is not uncommon for new drivers to bring small performance bumps to some games, but this time, Nvidia claims that its performance will be up to 23% faster in Apex Legends in 1080p. Admittedly, they only gave us numbers for their new RTX Super card crop, and the 23% result is only achieved by the RTX 2080 Super. On the other hand, if you have a RTX 2060 Super card, you only need to increase performance by 15%, which is not so sexy.

Forza Horizon 4 is a little more promising, the biggest performance bump belonging to the RTX 2060 Super instead of high-end cards, but the other games in the Nvidia chart are all under 10% or even just 5%. It's also unclear if you'll see similar performance gains on non-RTX graphics cards, as Nvidia has not provided any graphics to those on its website.

There's also a lot of new low latency for even faster input responses from your mouse and keyboard, and so on. (up to 33%!), but I think I've talked long enough about minor changes in the performance of your graphics card. that you will probably not notice much.

To download the driver, you can get it here or open GeForce Experience, spend ten minutes remembering the login information you used once in the distant past and update them automatically. Enjoy!