Not even a week has passed and we have another driver update from NVIDIA. Despite the quick turnaround this is not a rushed released. Indeed, we have some heavy hitters found in a good number of fixes, a relatively large number of game ready updates, and even official Vulkan support.

This driver update introduces the 364 driver branch and NVIDIA has issued several bug fixes this time around. Among them including a crash in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate when ShadowPlay is enabled, a system hang during installation, crashing in Adobe Illustrator CC 2015, and a problem with the Twitch broadcast game title not matching Twitch’s game library. With all these fixes though, it is important to note that some users are reporting this driver update crashing their systems. Due to this issue a clean install is recommended even more so than it usually is.

Update: 03/08: NVIDIA has posted a new beta driver, 364.51, that is reported to resolve the earlier driver's installation issues.

Meanwhile for game-specific updates, this driver brings performance and compatibility updates to Tom Clancy’s The Division, Hitman, Need for Speed, Ashes of the Singularity, and Rise of the Tomb Raider. Alongside the list game ready updates NVIDIA has provided SLI profiles for Hitman, The Technomancer, and Zui Shong Bing Qi (Ultimate Weapon).

Lastly, but possibly the biggest news of this update is that with the switch to a new driver branch, Vulkan support has moved out of beta and is now in NVIDIA's mainstream drivers. We looked at Vulkan just last month as implemented in The Talos Principle, and though it's merely proof of concept at this point, it represents significant progress in Vulkan development. However while we're talking about API support, this latest driver branch still doesn't have DirectX 12 support for NVIDIA's Fermi architectre, though as we've seen it working in developer drivers it should still be on its way.

Anyone interested can download the updated drivers through GeForce Experience or on the NVIDIA driver download page.

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  • ltcommanderdata - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link

    http://anandtech.com/show/10035/vulkan-10-released

    In regards to Fermi, any update on whether Fermi will get Vulkan support? Your launch article said Vulkan was Kepler and up, but nVidia previously said at Siggraph they would support Vulkan on Fermi.

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  • Mahigan - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link

    NVIDIA have announced that Fermi will not be getting Vulkan support.
  • Ryan Smith - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link

    Correct. Vulkan will only be for Kepler and later.
  • Samus - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link

    That's really funny, because they still have Fermi SKU's in production for OEM's to this day. Maybe they should have thought about canning Fermi production before discontinuing support for it. I just don't get why they are tapping out anything but Maxwell at this point...
  • Michael Bay - Thursday, March 10, 2016 - link

    Because everything past Maxwell is legacy to them, no need to put resources there. Maxwell itself will be, come middle or end of the year.
  • Alexvrb - Saturday, March 12, 2016 - link

    Wow and people criticized AMD for reducing driver support "too soon" for older pre-GCN architectures.
  • bug77 - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link

    Vulkan support past the last 2-3 generations doesn't make much sense anyway (and that stands for AMD, too). By the time we get titles actually built for Vulkan, it will be 2017/18 and by that time, said hardware just won't have the necessary horsepower.

    Maybe some professional software could use Vulkan even on Fermi, but I don't know much about that.
  • siriq - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link

    Nvidia is way too silent about DX 12 and Fermi! Vulkan api can be easy implement also to Fermi. The excuse what they found is, "low" base to do it. Still at least 10,000-20,000 Fermi owners out there. One more time at least. I bet Nvidia doesnt want to give free performance increase also. I personally measured 50% boost on draw calls. That was achieved with the early driver. WDDM 2.0 also gave me massive 45% boost.
  • Sttm - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link

    I'd rather they not divert their software engineers to work on the small install base of too cheap to upgrade consumers. I want them focus'd firmly on the people like me who upgrade regularly! The consumer that evangelizes their brand and gobbles up their products with the thickest profit margins.
  • testbug00 - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link

    They've also been working on Async compute for over 7 months now and haven't released it. If they started when the first Ashes benchmarking happened. Given they cannot finish the drivers they claim they can (I doubt Kepler and Maxwell can do Async compute) I see no reason for Fermi drivers to be started.

    Their overall Dx12 efforts seem pretty sad compared to AMD given how much faster they typically have done things in DX11 and how Nvidia has far more resources than AMD.

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