Usually when Nvidia releases a new GPU driver, it brings optimizations for specific games (often brand new games) under the banner of "Game Ready". This time, however, Nvidia is very focused on touting its full DirectX 12 Ultimate support. While this is basically tantamount to bragging rights, there are a few things worth noting.

"DirectX 12 Ultimate provides developers with a large multi-platform installed base of targeted hardware and ready-made tools and examples to work with. This will make game development faster and easier, allowing more developers to add these innovations to their games," Nvidia explains. [DX12 Ultimate is a collection of technologies that enable "unprecedented consistency between the PC and Xbox Series X."

"When a gamer purchases PC graphics hardware or an Xbox Series X with the DX12 Ultimate logo, that hardware will have DirectX Raytracing [DXR], variable rate shading, mesh shaders, sampler feedback," Microsoft states, "you can buy with confidence that you are guaranteed to support all next-generation graphics hardware features, including DirectX Raytracing [DXR], variable rate shaders, mesh shaders, and sampler feedback.

Here, at least temporarily, the bragging begins. At the moment, Nvidia's GeForce RTX stack is the only one that supports every one of these features; when AMD's next-generation graphics architecture, RDNA 2, arrives and is included on Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5, and PC graphics cards This situation will change once it is implemented in the Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5, and PC graphics cards.

Nvidia does not mention specific gaming optimizations in the release notes of its latest 451.48 driver package, so there is not much to be gained here and now. Furthermore, to take full advantage of these features, users will also need to have the latest version of Windows 10 (2004), which will be installed with the May 2020 update.

A little more interesting is a new feature introduced in the latest drivers called hardware accelerated GPU scheduling, which, according to Nvidia, "allows the video card to manage its own memory directly, thereby improving performance and potentially reducing latency . by allowing the video card to manage its own memory directly"

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It is not clear how much of a difference this would actually make, and we have not had the opportunity to run comparative tests to figure it out. However, the feature is mentioned casually, rather than emphasized in the same way as DX12 Ultimate support.

Besides these things, the latest driver adds more G-Sync capable monitors to the mix; Nvidia has certified nine new models. These include:

The latest drivers can be downloaded from GeForce Experience or obtained and installed manually from Nvidia's driver page.