NVIDIA Launches CES 2020 Driver As Wolfenstein: Youngblood Gets Ray Tracing
As it usually does during these big trade shows, NVIDIA has announced the launch of a new Game Ready Driver for its graphics cards. In keeping with tradition, this Game Ready Driver is bringing a bunch of new features along with it, chief among them being an option to set a maximum frame rate in games. For those obsessed with squeezing as high a framerate as they can out of their PC hardware, such a feature might seem a little odd, but NVIDIA offers a few good reasons why someone may want to turn it on.
For instance, turning on Max Frame Rate may allow those on laptops to save on power, which is handy when you're away from an outlet. Max Frame Rate will work alongside NVIDIA's Battery Boost and Whisper Mode too, so it sounds like laptop users have another option when it comes to getting more screen-on time out of a full charge.
When used in tandem with NVIDIA Control Panel's "Prefer Maximum Performance" setting, this Max Frame Rate feature could also reduce system latency, something that can be helped along by turning the Control Panel's Low Latency Mode to its ultra setting. Finally, being able to set a maximum frame rate can help prevent screen tearing by helping ensure that your frame rate stays within your Variable Refresh Rate range.
NVIDIA also announced today that Wolfenstein: Youngblood now supports ray tracing, assuming it's being played on compatible hardware. Ray tracing support is shipping along with an update this week, with that update also adding support for NVIDIA DLSS and Highlights. Youngblood players will want to install this Game Ready Driver along with the update for the game to make sure that everything is in good working order.
On top of the Max Frame Rate setting and support for ray tracing in Youngblood, this Game Ready Driver also has some stuff for VR players, namely a new feature called Variable Rate Supersampling. VRSS taps into Variable Rate Shading (VRS) to "dynamically apply up to 8x supersampling to the center of the VR headset display, where the eye is generally focused." They key to VRSS is that it only does that when there's GPU power to spare, which keeps the frame rate of the game you're playing stable.
Add to that a splitscreen filter for NVIDIA Freestyle, an image sharpening setting for the Control Panel, support for recently-launched and upcoming G-SYNC displays, and optimal play settings for around 30 games, and we've got ourselves a fairly beefy driver on our hands. You can read more about it or download the driver (441.87) over on the GeForce website.