Did Nvidia Just Upgrade your GPU?

Nvidia has made some big claims about the potential performance boosts in DX12 games on their latest driver, as well as expanding ResizeBAR support. Let's test it out!

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Chapters:
0:00 Nvidia's explanation of their changes and performance boost
1:58 Nvidia notes different GPUs and games will see different results
2:30 My test GPU and system specs
2:54 Nvidia claims different results at different resolutions
3:21 Testing Shadow of the Tomb Raider 4K Highest Preset
4:08 Shadow of the Tomb Raider 1080p Highest Preset
5:26 Forza Horizon 5 4K Extreme
6:18 Forza Horizon 5 1080p Extreme
6:46 Cyberpunk 2077 1440p RT Ultra DLSS Quality
8:00 Cyberpunk 2077 1080p Ultra
9:12 Horizon Zero Dawn 1440p Ultimate Quality
9:40 Horizon Zero Dawn 1080p Ultimate Quality
10:12 Horizon Zero Dawn 4K Ultimate Quality
10:50 Some final thoughts

[metzli]

Notice also that most of these are 1080p improvements. This is the area where amd held the most competitive performance. I imagine at least part of the reason was driver optimizations.

[BlackjackCZ]

It makes you wonder how much Nvidia holds back on the potential of their gpus. Competition is a good thing.

[Chilledoutredhead]

I feel like amd really has done us a solid. Them getting good has forced intel and nvidia to actually step up their game. Hopefully this continues.

[emma]

Yeah I saw that when it prompted me to download it. So far in the games I’ve played I haven’t really seen that big of a jump

[perplent]

I’ve also noticed cpu utilization consistently higher through multiple games. My guess about what this driver is doing with my 3080 is optimizing communication between cpu and gpu. Great vid I appreciate the info.

[MarginalSC]

Interesting they provided driver optimizations for games that get routinely benchmarked.

[nonaurbizniz]

Oddly enough I saw a performance boost to my 1080ti gaining a dozen frames or more across the board on any games it ran on the newest driver. My 3090 didn't seem to benefit much but there were increases.

[edwardhood]

One thing I noticed was that the frame time graph in every game you tested, at every resolution, seemed to be much smoother on the new driver than the old.

[DataDrifterOFC]

I might be a bit cynical when it comes to how Nvidia does business but I automatically assume the update is done to boost 3090 results on benchmarks to clear older stock.

[AirRyanTX]

I experienced a big hit to FPS in MS Flight Simulator with the new driver 522.25 released 10/12 on my 3080, so I rolled back to 517.48 where I experience better frames. I'm running DX12beta and DLSS in Flight Simulator.

[snarlynx]

I was shocked. I actually did get a bit more than 10 percent more frames in 2077 on my 3070 at 1440p which is one of the few single players games where every frame matters.

[michaelpoger]

I finally got a 3060
TI coming this Thursday. I’m so excited because my favorite games to play like Super Metroid and a Link to the past will truly shine.

[DAntoine]

I noticed a pretty big jump in cyberpunk with a 3070ti, at least 7-10fps at 1440p. I guess everyone’s mileage will vary but this is honestly the first pro consumer move nvidia has made in awhile.

[nfg_fpv]

I think where this new driver will really shine is in laptops as they usually have 1080p screens and are often limited by the lower power mobile cpu.

[byronfranek]

The higher end cards have greater capacity and are more often CPU-bound, especially with older CPU's that have relatively low IPC. It might be interesting to test this driver on the 8700K/9700K/10700k with 3080 to see if the new driver will improve GPU utilization with these commonly used CPU's.

[B-Man]

I’m on a rtx 2060 laptop and noticed a nice improvement on cyberpunk but minimal on other games.

[Arlyon]

Performance definitely increased for me on my 3080 Ti in cyberpunk. Was able to turn up RT settings to ultra. 4K DLSS quality.

[whatthefanart]

522.25 in *Cyberpunk 2077* was causing a weird map screen glitch, anywhere from half to the full screen being white static. Looked it up that a LOT of gamers were experiencing this and the solution was to roll back the driver.

[Iceman-hbuk]

Got an actually pretty good jump in performance with SAM on (r5 3600 @4.3GHz 1.2125V, 6700xt @2700MHz 1080mV, 16GB RAM 3200MHz cl16 @ 1.35V), like from 120 fps to 150/160 fps on FH5 custom (ultra preset with some settings maxed), around 5 FPS on MFS2020 (ultra preset, some other settings lower and 80 terrain lod to reduce CPU load, mainly less micro stutter and better stability) and around 10/15 fps on F1 22 (everything ultra, no RT, Singapore wet benchmark).
Also noticed lower temps, probably due to the fact SAM uses RAM instead of VRAM as long as it's available, meaning the memory get less usage and so also lower temps, lowering overall GPU temps.

I'm getting a 5600x soon and I'll surely play around a bit to see how much of a difference it makes with that CPU, but it's more than what we're seeing here from nvidia...
Also when AMD released the dx11 "optimized" drivers (or whatever was the exact name), the performance boost was more than nvidia one with their new dx12 games.
So I don't understand why AMD got such a big difference yet nvidia can't seem to truly make their cards benefit from the new drivers...

[micantcal]

I haven’t seen too many threads on this, there were some rumblings on Reddit about it. Anyways, there is a lot of users indicating that the new drivers are causing a system error where there Gpu usage is showing 100% in the task manager under the processes tab while idle. The only recourse was to roll back drivers to previous version.