NVIDIA’s game-ready driver for Call Of Duty: Black Ops III marks the beginning of a winter-long campaign to roll out optimised drivers for the quarter’s biggest triple-A releases. That means, in theory at least, the smoothest possible FPS performance for NVIDIA card owners from day one of each game’s release.
Want to find out whether third-party NVIDIA cards perform differently? Head over to ourGeForce GTX 970 group test.
The Black Ops III driver is available to download now ahead of tomorrow’s release, and it’s the first of a string of releases to coincide with big games landing. Here’s the full list of games getting their very own driver on release day:
· Call of Duty Black Ops III
· Fallout 4
· Civilization Online
· Star Wars Battle Front
· StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void
· Assassin’s Creed Syndicate
· Just Cause 3
· Rainbow Six Siege
· Fable Legend Open beta
· Monster Hunter Online
· RollerCoaster Tycoon World
NVIDIA have been at this game-ready driver thing for two years now, the idea being you get a new bespoke driver for big releases to ensure minimal stressheadaches due to FPS dips, crashes, stutters, and other very minor problems that keep us all up at night because PC gaming.
You’ll need to register with GeForce Experience to get all these updates on the day of release though. Otherwise, you’re waiting for the quarterly driver updates.
“Getting Game Ready requires careful coordination with developers and precise planning of internal resources,” say NVIDIA over at their official site.
“When a game ‘goes gold,’ we ratchet up our work. Our driver team looks for every performance tweak and bug fix and works until the 11th hour to get them into our Game Ready driver. Then we double check our work by getting each Game Ready driver WHQL certification from Microsoft.” Sounds like a right hassle. Glad I’m not heading up the game-ready driver division at NVIDIA.