Nvidia's 378.78 driver delivers giant gains in several DirectX 12 games

When AMD and Nvidia promise performance gains from a new driver, it's usually in the neighborhood of just a few percentage points. That is not the case with Nvidia's new "Game Ready" 378.78 driver. It's built to deliver the optimal gaming experience for Ghost Recon: Wildlands, but in addition to that, it turbo charges several DirectX 12 games, culminating in up to a generous 33 percent boost in Rise of the Tomb Raider.

Nvidia said it introduced a raft of DX12 optimizations in its latest driver. Those optimizations are specific to nearly half a dozen games that collectively see an average performance improvement of 16 percent, according to Nvidia's internal benchmarking. Here's a look:

With the exception of The Division, the performance gain from installing the new driver is either a double-digit percentage bump, or right at double digits, the latter of which is the case with Ashes of Singularity and Gears of War 4. The Division, meanwhile, sports up to a 4 percent increase in framerates—a modest improvement, but a jump in performance nonetheless.

For those who are interested in taking in-game screenshots, Nvidia also added Ansel support to Ghost Recon: Wildlands. In games that support Ansel, users can move the camera to any angle, apply filters, use super resolution capture, and capture footage in 360 for viewing in VR. It's basically a much fancier version of hitting the Print Screen key.

Outside of Wildlands, Ansel is supported in ARK: Survival Evolved, Conan Exiles, Dishonored 2, Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, Obduction, Paragon, War Thunder, Watch Dogs 2, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and The Witness. There are plans to add Ansel support to more games, including the upcoming Lawbreakers and Mass Effect: Andromeda.

Nvidia's 378.78 driver also brings full support for the mighty GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, for which we have a review in progress. In short, it offers better than Titan X (Pascal version) performance for the much lower price point of $700.

Go here to download the new driver.

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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).