Introduction

NVIDIA recently launched their beastly new GeForce RTX 4090 “Ada Lovelace” graphics card, storming to the top of the graphics card market. Since its launch last week, we’ve amassed nine graphics card reviews and articles for you, and are now working on a string of feature articles, the first of which was about PCIe scaling. Today we’re looking at something that’s only tangentially related to RTX 4090, and that’s the new GeForce 522.25 driver. In the changelog for these new drivers that also add RTX 4090 support, NVIDIA has a striking improvement listed, concerning DirectX 12 performance.

With the GeForce 522.25 WHQL drivers, NVIDIA claims to have improved the DirectX 12 graphics performance for its entire GeForce RTX 30-series “Ampere” graphics card lineup—everything from RTX 3050 to RTX 3090 Ti gets a free performance uplift in games, when using the DirectX 12 API. The company did not put out technical details on how it got this performance uplift, but such sweeping performance improvements, though rare, aren’t unheard of. Some people theorized that since this new driver build also removes the hashrate mining limiter, it has something to do with that, but there’s no way to know for sure. AMD recently updated its drivers to improve DirectX 11 performance for its RDNA2 and RDNA graphics cards (RX 6000 series and RX 5000 series) by reportedly reworking the software-end of the graphics rendering pipeline. Maybe that innovated NVIDIA to engineer something similar. Although the DirectX 12 API itself is standardized, much of the driver-side optimizations of both NVIDIA and AMD are secret sauce that the two almost never talk about in public, or even to the press.

We are hence compelled to test the new GeForce 522.25 drivers in this review. We had a hunch that these drivers don’t just benefit the RTX 30-series “Ampere,” but also the older RTX 20-series “Turing” and GTX 10-series “Pascal,” and so we set out to test them on three of the flagship graphics cards, one from each generation—RTX 3090 (Ampere), RTX 2080 Ti (Turing), and GTX 1080 Ti (Pascal), across our entire set of games, not just the ones that use DirectX 12. There’s no need to test on RTX 4090, these improvements were already part of the 521.90 Press Driver that we used for all our reviews. We’ll present you with per-game performance numbers, as well as averages across our wide selection of games. We are comparing the 522.25 drivers with their immediate predecessor, 517.48 WHQL.

Just to clarify, we’ve tested by installing the graphics card, installing 517.48 with clean install, running all benchmarks, then doing a clean install to 522.25 and running the benchmarks again, back-to-back.

If you have any of these generations of graphics cards, you might want to update to the latest drivers. Grab them from here.