Nvidia released a special "CES" branded driver update today for their video cards. The 441.87 driver includes a number of new features that Nvidia GPU owners across a few different generations will get to make use of. This driver update also includes a very interesting new feature for those who have VR devices.
A quick look at the new features:
- Maximum Refresh Rate - Cap your framerate without the need for third-party tools like RTSS.
- Variable Rate Super Sampling - Applying Nvidia's Variable Rate Shading (VRS) to dynamically apply an 8x supersampling to the center of a VR display. Only available on Turing (20xx) or higher cards.
- Better Image Sharpening
- Freestyle "Splitscreen" Filter - Apply filters to parts of a screen for artistic or comparison purposes.
So far, preliminary reports suggest that this new max refresh rate cap that Nvidia introduced today is a better implementation of its old, hidden framerate limiter. That is to say that it doesn't introduce as much input latency as their old method did. It also apparently performs better than something like RTSS at higher refresh rate settings. The use of a framerate cap like this is also beneficial for some cases where an in-game limiter introduces weird frame pacing issues for some titles.
This driver is also the "Game Ready" driver for Wolfenstein: Youngblood's upcoming ray tracing update. This update, scheduled to hit later this week, adds in new features like ray tracing, DLSS, and Nvidia Highlights. This driver is also "Game Ready" for the v1.3 update for Quake II RTX.
