With GeForce 522.25, Nvidia released a new driver for the GeForce RTX 4090 launch that supports the first Ada Lovelace graphics card. But an upgrade is also worthwhile for GeForce RTX 3000 owners, because the driver significantly increases performance in some cases. ComputerBase has benchmarks.
GeForce 522.25: Less driver overhead in DirectX 12 titles
“This Game Ready driver also includes significant DirectX 12 performance optimizations that can dramatically improve the performance of GeForce 30 series GPUs.“says the release notes for the driver. Shortly translated: The new driver has optimizations for DirectX 12, which should be able to speed up the GeForce RTX 3000 series.
In concrete terms, the new driver in DirectX 12 applications should result in less overhead and therefore less CPU load, leaving the processor with more free capacity to provide data to the graphics card, which in turn it increases your load and ultimately your FPS as well. The lower the resolution or the weaker the CPU compared to the GPU, the greater the effect should be.
On the trail of performance benefits
ComputerBase has understood how big it is on the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. This was recently tested for the GeForce RTX 4090 benchmark with GeForce driver 517.48, which did not yet contain these optimizations. So there are dew comparisons on a Core i9-12900K.
But not only the isolated view of the GeForce RTX 3000 series is of interest in this context. Since the GeForce RTX 4090 was tested with the non-public GeForce 521.90, which already contained the (now provable) optimizations, the question of the difference in distance between the RTX 3000 and RTX 4000 with the new driver also arises.
Updated benchmarks in the GeForce RTX 4090 test
In order to name the effects, ComputerBase again chased the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti throughout the course of testing with the new driver on Thursday morning as it was used in the GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition test on Tuesday. It maps a wide range of current games, from WQHD and UHD with and without ray tracing to 5K without ray tracing.
A detailed analysis can be found in the test update, a brief summary of the results follows at this point.
Driver update with great effect.
It turns out that the driver actually makes a difference to the course that is greater than what is normally expected from a driver update. At 5K, the difference is still small at over 2 percent in FPS and over 1 percent in frame times. The GeForce RTX 3090 Ti then bumps up four percent in UHD and five percent in WQHD. When using ray tracing, the FPS gains are slightly lower in each case because the load is shifted even more to the GPU.
This does not fundamentally change anything when evaluating the performance of the GeForce RTX 4090, but an eye-level comparison is only possible with the new driver for the GeForce RTX 3000. For this reason, the editors will retest the GeForce RTX 3000 unscheduled.
Significant increases in individual titles
The average rates hide the fact that there are a few titles where performance increases significantly. Two examples are Cyberpunk 2077, Halo Infinite, and Far Cry 6.
In Cyberpunk 2077, FPS in WQHD is increased by 16% on a powerful Core i9-12900K, reducing the gap to the RTX 4090 from 48% to 28%. In UHD and 5K, where the CPU plays a smaller role, the growth is 7 and 6 percent, respectively.
Halo Infinite also shows a 15 percent performance jump in WQHD, which decreases as the GPU cap increases.
In Far Cry 6 with ray tracing, the GeForce 522.25 actually teaches the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti to fly at the FPS percentile, showing 30 to 45 percent better performance. In-game, however, there were performance issues with the latest GeForce builds, mostly these were probably fixed. And yet, the old driver did not correctly reflect the relationship of the GeForce RTX 4090 with the new driver.
More individual results and performance ratings can be found in the GeForce RTX 4090 test update.
The new driver is also compatible with new GPUs.
VideoCardz I also noticed that the new driver also supports three new GeForce RTX 3000 series graphics cards. That is, it is a new GeForce RTX 3070 Ti (presumably based on GA102 and not GA104), a new GeForce RTX 3060 Ti (presumably based on GA104 instead of GA106) and a GeForce RTX 3060 with 8 GB (presumably as before with 12 GB based on GA106). Therefore, these graphics cards could be released shortly and most likely without the accompanying media.
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