Nvidia driver update should greatly speed up PC games

Nvidia has rolled out a new GPU driver that should significantly speed up game launches.

The update, 621.01, adds Microsoft’s new Advanced Shader Delivery tech to reduce the load on CPUs by offloading the heavy lifting to the cloud. As Nvidia notes, modern games rely on tens of thousands of complex shaders as well as generic shader files that result in a slow, CPU-heavy process that can take up to 30 minutes.

But with Microsoft’s latest tech, the cloud network can greatly cut down these wait times by precompiling shaders for hundreds of thousands of hardware and driver combinations. It also removes mid-game “just-in-time” shader compilation that can cause CPU spikes and frame stutters.

For now, this week’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 and the recently released Gears of War: E-Day from Vancouver’s The Coalition support Advanced Shader Delivery. You’ll need to download these games via the Xbox PC app, but from there, you’ll benefit from the new shader system even when playing Steam games as long as the Xbox app remains installed.

The 621.01 update can be downloaded here. The new GPU driver comes as part of a larger series of updates to improve gaming on Nvidia GeForce. The full breakdown can be found on Nvidia’s blog.

Image credit: Activision