Nvidia releases ‘Game Ready’ 381.89 WHQL driver

Just in case you missed the pop-up box in Windows, Nvidia has a new Game Ready driver package available. This latest update—version 381.89 WHQL—is optimized for several games, including Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III, Heroes of the Storm 2.0, Batman: Arkham VR, Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality, and Wilson's Heart.

That is a larger collection of optimized games than is typical of Game Ready driver update, though not unprecedented by Nvidia. In this case, it seems Nvidia spent most of its time coding in optimizations than fixing issues, as there are only four changes and fixes mentioned in the release notes. They include:

  • [Sniper Elite 3]: The game crashes.
  • [Notebook][eDP panel]: Blue-screen (code 3B) occurs followe by the Recovery screen during software unbundling process.
  • [GeForce GTX 1060]: Blue-screen crash occurs pointing to driver (Nvlddmkm.sys) after the system reboots from sleep mode.
  • GPU idling voltage has increased.

There are still a bunch of open issues Nvidia is working to correct, including over a dozen in Windows 10 and five more spread out between Windows 8/8.1 and Windows 7.

Going forward do not be surprised to see Nvidia concentrate part of its efforts on VR games.

"Having the best possible quality for a game at launch is important, and it becomes even more important in VR titles. Gameplay issues or bugs can break immersion and ruin a VR experience. Our long-running Game Ready driver program delivers the best possible experience by optimizing performance and latency, which is especially important for smooth, stutter-free virtual reality gameplay," Nvidia says.

You can download the latest driver package here.

Paul Lilly

Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).