Nvidia releases a ‘Game Ready’ GPU driver for the Windows 10 October update

If you're running a GeForce graphics card and have installed the October 2018 update for Windows 10, Nvidia has a new set of GPU drivers available that are supposed to make the most of your setup.

The new 416.16 WHQL release brings "Game Ready" status to the latest Windows 10 build, which Microsoft started officially released a couple of days ago. Microsoft won't begin pushing the update to end users until October 9, but if you want to download it early you can. Nvidia doesn't list any specific games in its release notes, but notes that one of the key features of the October update for Windows 10 is the first public support for Microsoft's DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API.

"This is huge for two reasons: (1) DXR provides an industry-standard application programming interface (API) that gives all game developers access to GeForce RTX’s hardware support of ray tracing. (2) DXR adds support for ray tracing to the Windows operating system, so DirectX 12 Windows PCs can now execute the applications that support real-time ray tracing," Nvidia says.

Nvidia has an obvious vested interest in ray tracing, because that's the primary focus of its new GeForce RTX graphics cards (2080 Ti, 2080, and 2070). All three of the new cards feature specialized hardware for real-time ray tracing, in the form of dedicated RT cores. On the software side, leveraging DXR (and by extension, Nvidia's RTX technology) requires the latest Windows 10 build and updated GPU drivers. Both are now available.

The release notes don't indicate if there are performance benefits for GeForce GTX owners, though it's typically good practice to install the latest drivers following a major OS update. Of course, it's also good practice to hold off a few days to make sure there aren't any unexpected issues.

Whether or not GeForce GTX owners can expect added performance, there are a handful of fixed issues with the 416.16 driver release. They include:

[Pascal GPUs][Quake HD Remix]: Black square glitches appear when using the Quake HD Remix mod with soft shadows enabled.
[GeForce GTX 1060][Regime][Rainbow 6: Siege]: Temporal antialiasing causes a drop in performance.
[Titan Xp]: Driver error (nvlddmkm ) occurs on resume from S4.
[Turing GPU][[Netflix]: Playback resolution doesn't show 4K bit rates when using a USB-C-HDMI connection.

As always, you can have GeForce Experience fetch the drivers for you, or you can head to Nvidia's driver page and grab them yourself.

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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).