NVIDIA Releases 352.86 Game Ready WHQL Drivers For The Witcher 3
by Ryan Smith on May 18, 2015 8:15 AM EST
With the highly anticipated The Witcher 3 being released today, NVIDIA has pushed out their requisite launch day Game Ready driver for the game with the release of driver version 352.86.
As is typical for a Game Ready driver, the focus on this driver is enabling SLI and GeForce Experience support for The Witcher 3, which along with its high profile nature is also one of the games in NVIDIA’s latest game bundle. Along with The Witcher, this driver also includes profile updates and bug fixes for a handful of other games, including Civilization: Beyond Earth and Magicka 2.
Perhaps more interesting is the fact that this marks the first Windows 7/8 (WDDM 1.x) release of a R352 branch driver. NVIDIA’s previous release for Grand Theft Auto V was from the R349 branch, and in fact this new branch comes barely a month after the introduction of the R349 branch. Unfortunately at this time beyond the handful of bug fixes and new profiles we don’t know whether R352 includes any major updates, as NVIDIA's release notes don't mention much else for this release. New branches typically contain more significant feature and performance enhancements, so there may be a surprise or two in here. At any rate what we do know is that NVIDIA has yet to merge their Win7/8 and Win10 drivers at this time, so this release only contains support for Microsoft’s current OSes, while the in-development Windows 10 continues to receive its own driver updates.
As usual, you can grab the drivers for all current desktop and mobile NVIDIA GPUs over at NVIDIA’s driver download page.
Source: NVIDIA (via SH SOTN)
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chizow - Monday, May 18, 2015 - link
Feel free to take your own advice.MrSpadge - Monday, May 18, 2015 - link
A better solution than seperate downloads would be a unified setup which downloads only the needed routines. This would suffice for most and there could still be the complete package for those who want it.chizow - Monday, May 18, 2015 - link
I think they already kind of have that, GeForce Experience already does most of this, inventorying and checking for new game profiles and drivers based on your hardware and allowing you to choose to install updates, or not.DCide - Monday, May 18, 2015 - link
I don't pretend to know the details of current video driver design, but obviously the only thing that matters here (in terms of size) is how much RAM the driver consumes at run-time. The size of the download isn't that important. The costs of nVidia tracking and maintaining a bunch of different versions for various architectures would be much worse for both nVidia and the end user.I find it very hard to believe nVidia isn't utilizing the smart code-loading techniques that have available for a long time now. In other words, they're not wasting RAM. Your ~disastrous proposal is what video driver designers intelligently got away from years ago!
chizow - Monday, May 18, 2015 - link
No one said anything about RAM, not a single time lol. I am talking about new lines of driver code that increase the size of drivers 2-3 fold for each arch supported, from the current 300MB you are looking at possibly 1GB worth of drivers. Bandwidth from someone like Akamai isn't exactly cheap, basically you are digitally distributing what used to be an entire game a decade ago millions of times a month, sometimes more.Kegmeister - Tuesday, May 19, 2015 - link
This makes sense as long as they can find an easy way to implement it. Different products/architectures should have different driver streams. Even better would be to have the shared part be a different piece than the device-specific part so that each can be updated individually. I honestly have no clue how drivers work; I'm just thinking about this from a programming perspective.Daniel Egger - Monday, May 18, 2015 - link
Huh? Unlike the previous "GeForce Game Ready Driver for Grand Theft Auto V" these are not specifically released for one game but called the usual "GeForce Game Ready Driver". That kind of makes me hope that it is not as much of a half-assed version like the GTA one...hawtdawg - Monday, May 18, 2015 - link
Is this the driver that makes sure my 780's run Witcher 3 like dogshit so Nvidia can keep pretending like Maxwell was some huge improvement in efficiency?MrSpadge - Monday, May 18, 2015 - link
No.hawtdawg - Monday, May 18, 2015 - link
So I guess Kepler was just such a shitty architecture that a 780 is suddenly about on part with a 7970 with recent games.