Nvidia Releases Game Ready Driver For Oculus Rift, 'Dark Souls III'

[heirdeux]

As expected, Nvidia released a new Game Ready driver to support the launch of the Oculus Rift as well as a few VR and upcoming PC games.

Nvidia Releases Game Ready Driver For Oculus Rift, 'Dark Souls III' : Read more

 

[toddybody]

Will these one's allow me to "eject my GPU"...or will they instead cause some pronounced stability issues? Either way, thanks nVidia!

 

[agentbb007]

Cool, will Elite: Dangerous work in VR with the Rift?

 

[eltoro]

Prompt driver releases in time for game releases time and time again. Not only AMD is lagging in performance and feature support, but they are way behind when comparing the two companies driver releases. And yes, AMD suffers from driver bugs too, and from my experience even more than NVIDIA.
People can keep talking about NVIDIA's general market conducts and unfair competition, but the fact is that they offer a better experience to their customers.

 

[ohim]

They should drop this "game ready" it`s a fancy way to say rushed beta driver to look cool to the fans, remember how they pulled the last "game ready" driver since it wasn`t that ready.

Prompt driver releases in time for game releases time and time again. Not only AMD is lagging in performance and feature support, but they are way behind when comparing the two companies driver releases. And yes, AMD suffers from driver bugs too, and from my experience even more than NVIDIA.
People can keep talking about NVIDIA's general market conducts and unfair competition, but the fact is that they offer a better experience to their customers.

From my experience with my first ever AMD card i can tell you that AMD has very little driver issue and most people just talk to be talking, you can visit both Nvidia and AMD forums and see both companies have issue.

"Game ready" is just an Nvidia fancy way to say "beta driver" that suppose to be working good with a certain game, note that the game can run just fine even without a "game ready" driver, this is pure marketing at core and it seems it has effect on naive people. Yes they fix some stuff in the upcoming titles but very little.

As for performance , sorry to tell you but AMD hardware keeps it up for longer time, see 290 series still being relevant, most people don`t even talk about 7xx series from Nvidia.

 

[ohim]

And about people bashing Nvidia is not about how good or bad their hardware or drivers are, people are bashing them for the unfair Gameworks practice that technically cripples all AMD GPUs. There are plenty of gamer rants on YT explaining why Gameworks is cancer to the gaming industry, and this comes from people with actual Nvidia hardware.

Most of the Gameworks stuff work only on GTX 980Ti anyway since the other lesser GPUs are too slow to actually have all the effects up, but all this is to block AMD from optimizing drivers for the game since they don`t have access to the Gameworks crap.

 

[quilciri]

Anyone else miss the comma and come here thinking "VR Dark Souls, wtf?"

 

[turkey3_scratch]

Prompt driver releases in time for game releases time and time again. Not only AMD is lagging in performance and feature support, but they are way behind when comparing the two companies driver releases. And yes, AMD suffers from driver bugs too, and from my experience even more than NVIDIA.
People can keep talking about NVIDIA's general market conducts and unfair competition, but the fact is that they offer a better experience to their customers.

Actually as of late AMD's drivers have been top-notch and Nvidia's have been a bit floppy. But neither are perfect, but just goes to show you it's totally subjective saying one or the other has better drivers.

 

[blppt]

"From my experience with my first ever AMD card i can tell you that AMD has very little driver issue and most people just talk to be talking, you can visit both Nvidia and AMD forums and see both companies have issue. "

For single cards, yes, but for like the millionth time, CFX/SLI heavily depends on new driver releases for the latest titles, and up until very recently, AMD has been miserable in that regard.

Likewise, I'm sure an older, verified stable Nvidia driver release would work with the newest games, but if you have multi-gpu, these game-day releases are necessary.

Hopefully DX12 somewhat mitigates a new driver package everytime a new game comes out (for SLI/CFX), because installing drivers all the time is indeed annoying.

 

[ohim]

"From my experience with my first ever AMD card i can tell you that AMD has very little driver issue and most people just talk to be talking, you can visit both Nvidia and AMD forums and see both companies have issue. "

For single cards, yes, but for like the millionth time, CFX/SLI heavily depends on new driver releases for the latest titles, and up until very recently, AMD has been miserable in that regard.

Likewise, I'm sure an older, verified stable Nvidia driver release would work with the newest games, but if you have multi-gpu, these game-day releases are necessary.

Hopefully DX12 somewhat mitigates a new driver package everytime a new game comes out (for SLI/CFX), because installing drivers all the time is indeed annoying.

When people get multi-gpu setups they already know they will going to have a hard time, no matter if it`s Nvidia or AMD. And talking about SLI, it took Nvidia several months to get SLI working on Windows 10 while AMD users could use it without issues, i remember playing BF4 and seeing the few people that actually ran SLI complaining that they are o only 1 card since Nvidia had trouble bringing a new driver.

As for the guy who said AMD is again behind the drivers just so you know AMD has a driver out for Oculus Rift and since the version number just changed from 16.3.1 to 16.3.2 it just shows it`s a simple addon to the existing driver itself but Nvidia seems to take their marketing lessons from Apple, trying to make it big with each minor update.. thus having "game ready" drivers.

PS: for now i see tests with AMD GPU as primary and Nvidia GPU as secondary as the best option for multi-GPU rigs under DX12, i wonder how much time it will take Nvidia to bring a driver that will block this kind of use, you know.. just like disabling the PhysX in the drivers if an AMD GPU was found in the system.

 

[blppt]

"When people get multi-gpu setups they already know they will going to have a hard time, no matter if it`s Nvidia or AMD."

No offense, but you are completely dismissing the currently vast gap of solid multi-gpu support between the two companies. For example, it is now almost month 5 and we still do not have a working CFX profile for Fallout 4, which is not exactly a low-selling indie release. Now, we can dump all the blame on Gameworks, but AMD did eventually get a solid CFX profile working for Witcher 3, and it didnt take 5 months. And while I dont expect to have perfect GPU scaling on day 1, Nvidia is much, much quicker at getting a solid M-GPU driver out for the latest titles.

Also, if memory serves, they (AMD) had gotten a good, solid CFX profile out for the 1.2 patch of FO4, so we cant even blame Gameworks. Since that patch, which worked for a whole 3 days before the 1.3 patch was released (or however short it was) CFX has been a hitching mess on my two 290x(s). I think it was 16.2 or 16.3.0 in which they just apparently completely disabled CFX (by default) for FO4. Not sure why they re-enabled it by default for 16.3.2, since it is still unusable for me.

BF4, was a mess all around---if you remember, it was developed as a flagship title for AMD's new Mantle API, which they couldnt get working for like 6 months after release. Not sure that's a great indication of Nvidia failing and AMD succeeding.

 

[ohim]

"When people get multi-gpu setups they already know they will going to have a hard time, no matter if it`s Nvidia or AMD."

No offense, but you are completely dismissing the currently vast gap of solid multi-gpu support between the two companies. For example, it is now almost month 5 and we still do not have a working CFX profile for Fallout 4, which is not exactly a low-selling indie release. Now, we can dump all the blame on Gameworks, but AMD did eventually get a solid CFX profile working for Witcher 3, and it didnt take 5 months. And while I dont expect to have perfect GPU scaling on day 1, Nvidia is much, much quicker at getting a solid M-GPU driver out for the latest titles.

Also, if memory serves, they (AMD) had gotten a good, solid CFX profile out for the 1.2 patch of FO4, so we cant even blame Gameworks. Since that patch, which worked for a whole 3 days before the 1.3 patch was released (or however short it was) CFX has been a hitching mess on my two 290x(s). I think it was 16.2 or 16.3.0 in which they just apparently completely disabled CFX (by default) for FO4. Not sure why they re-enabled it by default for 16.3.2, since it is still unusable for me.

BF4, was a mess all around---if you remember, it was developed as a flagship title for AMD's new Mantle API, which they couldnt get working for like 6 months after release. Not sure that's a great indication of Nvidia failing and AMD succeeding.

No ofense, but Fallout 4 is a Gameworks title, a title that has Nvidia coding that AMD doesn`t have access to it. I also like to keep my life simple, and without problems, while i was using Nvidia GPUs i never used SLI, same with AMD, i`ll never use CF.

Come to think of it i never even used PhysX because it was alwasy a FPS hog, only thing that i`ve really enjoyed that was green team exclusive was the Shadowplay.

 

[blppt]

"No ofense, but Fallout 4 is a Gameworks title, a title that has Nvidia coding that AMD doesn`t have access to it. I also like to keep my life simple, and without problems, while i was using Nvidia GPUs i never used SLI, same with AMD, i`ll never use CF."

Ummm, again, you cant just blame it on Gameworks for 2 reasons: 1. They had a good working CFX driver for Witcher 3 a couple of months after release (As we know, Witcher 3 has Gameworks) and 2. They got CFX working pretty well for FO4 1.2, the problem being that they released it like a day before the 1.3 beta patch went "official" on Steam. Since that update (1.3+), there has been basically nothing on the FO4 CFX front that I can see. Its like they gave up.

I agree with your sentiment with CFX---unless this DX12 multi-adaptor (non AFR) thing gets wide game support or AMD steps up their game on CFX profiles, I'd likely go single card for my next AMD build. SLI, though, has been very largely a positive experience for me for a long time now. So even if this ideal DX12 solution doesnt get widely supported by developers, I'd have no issue going multi-gpu for my next Nvidia box.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

I'm just not a fan of any API that only supports one particular brand. I like an API that supports Nvidia, AMD, and Intel cards all across the board. Gameworks makes it harder on the programmers because they then have to spend more time coding these features specific to Nvidia cards, whereas an API like DirectX will work on compatible cards across all brands. I think the game industry should focus on making enjoyable games for all people.

 

[blppt]

turkey, Gameworks is not a competitor to DirectX---its a set of graphical libraries to theoretically make it easier to put some certain types of effects for any given developer, but it is through DirectX.

The problem with GW and AMD is not that it doesnt run on their cards (it does) its that Nvidia seemingly developed these tools to exploit certain areas of their own architecture that are Nvidia's strength (e.g. the tessellation advantage of their 9xx series) and not necessarily AMD's cards strengths.

Nor, would I imagine Nvidia making the code for these GW libraries themselves available to AMD to optimize their drivers for. Could be wrong on that last part though.

However, even if they did allow complete access to the GW libraries for AMD to optimize their drivers for, AMD would likely still have a noticable performance deficit versus the equivalent Nvidia card because AFAIK, even the Fury X doesnt quite match the 980Ti for tessellation performance in the tessellation-saturated GW libraries (although amusingly, the 290x versus the Nvidia 7xx series ends up being the stronger performer in heavily tessellation, IIRC).