Santa Monica Studio's God of War launched on PC this week, debuting a franchise that has been a mainstay of Playstation console gaming for over a decade. In keeping with their long-standing 'Game Ready' program NVIDIA have released a new graphics driver that incorporates optimisations for this big new release, but that's not all that's included in this update.

The GeForce Game Ready 511.23 WHQL driver is the first to support Deep Learning Digital Super Resolution (DLDSR), a new form of NVIDIA DSR that leverages AI and RTX hardware to more effectively downscale games rendered higher than monitor frame rates. Where there's headroom in the rendering horsepower available to your system, for example when playing older titles or running without other computationally expensive forms of anti-aliasing, DSR can be an excellent means of gaining improve visuals.

In addition to God of War this driver is Game Ready for Monster Hunter Rise, Rainbow Six Extraction, Hitman III and The Anacrusis, each of which are launching soon or gaining new DLC content before the next expected driver update window.

NVIDIA are also adding support for new Vulkan and OpenCL extensions as part of the v510 driver family. These extensions, alongside optional compiler optimisations for OpenCL (the OpenCL NVVM 7.0 Compiler), should serve to improve performance in software that utilises the APIs but won't necessarily add new functionality.



This driver is also the first in the main branch to support the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 12GB, a GPU that enjoyed an exclusive driver release earlier this week.

You can download the GeForce Game Ready 511.23 driver through the GeForce Experience desktop app or directly via geforce.com/drivers. These drivers support GPUs as far back as the GTX 900-series (Maxwell architecture) and are compatible with 64-bit versions of Windows 10 and 11.

About NVIDIA DLDSR

NVIDIA DSR is an alternative form of anti-aliasing that uses super-sampling techniques rather than lossy-but-fast temporal or screen-space optimisations such as TAA and FXAA. Anti-aliasing is by its very nature computationally expensive, particularly super-sampling subtypes that increase the effective rendering resolution of a frame; unfortunately super-sampling techniques are also some of the best for visual clarity.

Many games, be they old or just relatively kind on your hardware, don't necessarily need 100% of your GPU resources to operate at ideal frame rates at a given monitor resolution. In these cases you can take advantage of the most 'expensive' AA around by rendering at a resolution higher than your monitor's native specs and then down-sampling to native resolution, eliminating many of the artefacts of heavily optimised techniques. The higher your render resolution, the more accurate your final image will be.

Although available through 3rd party utilities, NVIDIA were the first to integrate super-sampling feature at the driver level with NVIDIA DSR, followed by their competitors. It has however fallen out of favour as focus shifted to ray tracing and DLSS, two features that don't leave much room for standard DSR at current GPU performance levels.

DLDSR takes things a step further by improving the downsampling method using a pre-trained neural network, resulting in an output frame that's as good as DSR 4x (using 4 rendered pixels for each final image pixel) with just DLDSR 2.25x (using 2.25x the rendered pixels for a final frame).

In practice, this means that a DLDSR user can get the equivalent quality of a 4K-rendered and downscaled image with one rendered at 1620p. That's a huge increase in performance that makes the technology viable for a much wider selection of games.

Unfortunately DLDSR is only supported on NVIDIA RTX hardware, but those sporting RTX hardware now have something extra to do with all those CUDA cores that otherwise go to waste when playing classics from the pre-ray tracing era on 1080p monitors.

Release Notes



SOURCE: NVIDIA GeForce Driver Article