Drivers have become an important point regarding the performance of graphics cards. Architectures that due to hardware should have a much higher performance than they have in a real scenario are hampered by a bad graphics driver. What makes these have to be continuously optimized with new versions for the new titles that are coming out. The NVIDIA 522.25 WHQL driver promises an improvement in all brand cards when running games under said API.
One of the peculiarities of DirectX 12 with respect to previous versions of the API is that with regard to Direct3D it allows the use of several processor cores and not just one to manage the command lists. Although we still have a single screen list, several lists of commands are used for computation for post-processing purposes, to manage Ray Tracing, the calculation of game physics. However, managing multiple lists of commands requires a quality driver and a proper command processor on the GPU.
What is the gaming performance with the new 522.25 WHQL driver?
With the launch of the RTX 4090 a problem could be seen and that is not even with the most powerful processors on the market today. That is, the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and the Intel Core i9-12900KS cannot get all the performance from the graphics. That’s why NVIDIA has released the new 522.25 WHQL driver which reduces the load of the driver on the processor. The consequences? Well, an increase in the frame rate and since the driver is general for all cards.
Our colleagues at TechPowerUp have tested several games and on three different cards: the GTX 1080Tithe RTX 2080 Ti and the RTX 3090. Which have been the most powerful released by NVIDIA for three generations in a row. The system used to test them? AMD Ryzen 7 5800X with 16 GB of DDR4-4000 RAM and a 2 TB SSD. Regarding the resolutions tested and as you can see in the images below, the performance has been tested in the three standard resolutions: 1080p or full HD, 1440p or Quad HD and 2160p or 4K.
As you can see in the graphics, the performance increase is generalized and, therefore, it is taking time to update the drivers of your NVIDIA graphics card, which is free and will not cost you anything more than downloading them from the internet and installing them. . That is, they are totally free and the improvement in the frame rate in games with DirectX 12 is worth it. Especially in games like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and Halo Infinite that make use of said graphics API to generate their graphics.
Not just for DX12
In any case, not only games under DX12 are improved, but also those that work under previous versions and with Vulkan, so the 522.25 WHQL driver is an update that all users of NVIDIA cards benefit from. the last four generations.
