Gamers may notice that once or twice a month, NVIDIA releases a wave of massive performance improvements in the game drivers that support new games. Unlike other manufacturers' chicken blood drivers, NVIDIA's driver updates are usually stable and punctual, and usually it is actually a Game Ready Driver (GRD driver for short), which is a driver built for game optimization.
Nowadays, most PC devices do not need to update the driver frequently, and the driver updated by gamers is mainly the graphics card driver, how can the Game Ready driver improve the performance of the graphics card in the case of frequent updates to the driver? There are many secrets that can make the driver improve performance like chicken blood, and the driver (driver) still has to let the old driver (driver) explain it.
NVIDIA recently released the Game Ready driver is GeForce 512.59 version, in addition to providing optimization support for the game Dune: Spice Wars, but also to the "Sword Man Romance Online Edition III" game to bring an updated version of DLSS, the addition of 3 G-Sync compatible monitors and so on.
With the release of this version of the driver, NVIDIA also released a video to introduce how the Game Ready driver is made, which popularizes the production process of GRD, collaborative optimization with the game development team, massive testing on a variety of different platform devices, and what optimizations have been made to ensure that GeForce players have the best performance and reliability on the day of the game release, and the story behind it is worth seeing.
In terms of Game Ready-driven game optimization alone, NVIDIA's work in this area has three main secrets, as follows:
NVIDIA's game-driven secret works with developers to tune and optimize
Before introducing the game optimization driver, NVIDIA simply popularized how the game works and what everyone cares about about the performance of the game.
To put it simply, the process of the game from software to GPU has four links, one is DirectX Game, the middle is the user layer driver, the kernel layer driver, and finally to the GPU, each of which may lead to poor game performance, NVIDIA Game Ready driver game optimization is closely related to it.
As for the game performance that gamers care about, it is often said that performance refers to the average frame, but there are many actual performance parameters, and there is a delay in addition to the average frame, the minimum frame, and the frame time, and the delay also involves many aspects.
With so many areas involved in game performance, how can you be sure that driver support for your game is ready when it debuts? NVIDIA said in the video that the first thing they have to do is to work with game developers and continuously tune and optimize from the early stages of game development.
NVIDIA now works well with most game manufacturers, working with game developers to establish regular exchange of pre-release game versions and driver updates.
NVIDIA works with game developers to find optimizations, solve problems, and iterate over driver versions accordingly to ensure that the game and Game Ready drivers deliver the best quality and performance at launch.
NVIDIA drivers will even last longer than game manufacturers, because the latter mainly releases patches and DLC expansion packs after the release of games, and NVIDIA will continue to push driver optimizations after the Game Ready driver, which is more difficult than game manufacturers.
NVIDIA's game driver secrets are tested extensively for superior performance and reliability
Although NVIDIA will participate in the drive optimization work from the early stage of game development, but for NVIDIA for the real PC players to optimize the driver is more complex, the world's PC platform hundreds of millions, each configuration has, even 10 years ago the PC computer will not be eliminated, to ensure that the driver has a stable and excellent performance on these platforms, it is also necessary to call his test.
That's how NVIDIA's Game Ready drivers are built up, with a large in-house team working on development and testing, involving more than 1,000 different tests in a single day, spanning a large number of released and upcoming games. In 2021 alone, there were more than 1.8 million hours of testing, equivalent to 214 calendar years.
Since the first Launch of the Game Ready driver in 2014, NVIDIA has now launched more than 150 Game Ready drivers with support for more than 400 games; in 2021 alone, 20 Game Ready drivers have been released, supporting 75 games.
In addition to supporting specific games, NVIDIA has teams that are specifically tested and optimized for Unreal Engine, Unity, and other leading development engines, which ensures that games based on these engines run very smoothly and stably.
In order to ensure the quality of the Game Ready driver, NVIDIA also has 2 special requirements, one is never to release a beta version of the Game Ready driver, do not give users the opportunity to be a guinea pig, and the other requirement is that all Game Ready drivers are also WHQL drivers, that is, through Microsoft's WHQL certification, to ensure compatibility with the system.
These two requirements ensure that the quality standards of the Game Ready driver are higher than the general driver, so everyone can see the word Game Ready and can safely and boldly upgrade.
NVIDIA Game Driver Tips provide gamers with added value
After doing the above two points, you can ensure that the Game Ready driver has no problems with the optimization of the game's support and the stable compatibility of the driver, which is even a very good driver, but for NVIDIA, the goal of the Game Ready driver is not only to be excellent, but also to give players more added value.
In recent years, N meal using NVIDIA's driver should be obviously felt, in addition to the driver, the supporting GeForce Experience and other software has also become a powerful game toolbox, bringing a lot of useful and interesting new technologies and new features, such as game one-click optimization, in-game screenshots, video recording, driver automatic updates and so on.
Recently, there are many new features, such as NVIDIA Reflex technology that can test and reduce system latency, and the previous need for a compatible Reflex delay analyzer display, but now the introduction of Reflex Stats, you can directly use the software to view the system latency.
For those players or professional anchors who like to play the game live at the same time, there are many enhancements in the NVIDIA driver, such as NVIDIA Broadcast's AI enhanced audio and video effects, etc., which have been used and said well.
NVIDIA's Game Ready-driven collaboration model has been widely praised by well-known players in the gaming industry, said Billy Khan, director of engine technology at id Software, "NVIDIA has been our close partner for many years. We work closely together throughout the game development cycle to ensure that the Game Ready driver is specifically optimized for our games, providing excellent compatibility, stability, and game performance so that players can enjoy the best possible gaming experience on the day the game is released."
For ordinary players, the complex game optimization, testing and enhancements behind the Game Ready driver not only allow players to experience smoother and more stable game performance, but also a stable game experience.