# NVIDIA GeForce 522.25 Driver Analysis



## W1zzard (Oct 17, 2022)

NVIDIA's newest drivers promise performance improvements for DirectX 12 games for Ampere. We put this to the test in our Driver Performance Analysis article, testing 25 games at three resolutions. Our benchmarks confirm: not only Ampere gets higher FPS, but Pascal and Turing, too.

*Show full review*


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## P4-630 (Oct 17, 2022)

I admit, already installed it....  

Runs fine sofar with my 2070 Super...


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## dj-electric (Oct 17, 2022)

I'd love to move to 522.25, but it has a display bug with some panels, limiting their resolution to the lowest.
That's a cold skip.


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## R0H1T (Oct 17, 2022)

Well I had major instability on the 3080, reverted back to last "stable" studio drivers!


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## mechtech (Oct 17, 2022)

Interesting stuff
So older games and older card less gains
newer cards and newer games more gains

I thought you were gonna test the hash rates  









						NVIDIA Removes Hashrate Limiter for RTX 30-series LHR GPUs in the Latest Driver
					

In a last-ditch effort to clear inventory of its GeForce RTX 30-series "Ampere" graphics cards, NVIDIA has reportedly removed the hashrate limiter in the latest GeForce 522.25 drivers, without mentioning it anywhere in the driver's release notes. A Redditor and GeForce RTX 3080 Ti owner by the...




					www.techpowerup.com


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## RH92 (Oct 17, 2022)

Already installed here, no issue to report for the time being .


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## Ware (Oct 17, 2022)

I checked a few games myself before and after updating to these drivers and saw no improvement on my 3070@1440.
Division 2 DX12 showed <1% difference gain is FPS, though the CPU graph was slightly smoother.
Other DX11(Hunt, Steep) and Vulkan(Rage 2, WWZ) games had no gains.
I didn't change any settings or test other resolutions so YMMV.
I've not had any stability issues with these 522.25 drivers.

Other sources are claiming the performance gains are from "shader compilation optimizations, improved Resizable BAR, and less CPU overhead".

Supposedly, these gains were seen on a 3090:
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: up to 24%
Battlefield 2042: up to 7%
Borderlands 3: Up to 8%
Call of Duty: Vanguard: up to 12%
Control: up to 6%
Cyberpunk 2077: up to 20%
F1Ⓡ 22: up to 17%
Far Cry 6: up to 5%
Forza Horizon 5: up to 8%
Horizon Zero Dawn: Complete Edition: up to 8%
Red Dead Redemption 2: up to 7%
Shadow of the Tomb Raider: up to 5%
Tom Clancy’s The Division 2: up to 5%
Watch Dogs: Legion: up to 9%
They claim higher end cards gain more, with the 3060 only gaining up to 7% on AC: Valhalla

Seems like more gains on games that use resizable BAR, but IDK...
I was hoping to see something, but on my rig, on my settings, on my games, I got nothing...


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## mahirzukic2 (Oct 17, 2022)

Ware said:


> Seems like more gains on games that use resizable BAR, but IDK...
> I was hoping to see something, but on my rig, on my settings, on my games, I got nothing...


That's the thing, that's why we have reviews on the TPU, and they have found out there were increases from 1 - 2.5%, and that's just using some games. If you included more games, you'd probably see it is a wash, meaning no meaningful gain across the board, but rather some give and take like it usually is with new driver releases.


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## wheresmycar (Oct 17, 2022)

nice!

@W1zzard any chance adding Battlefield 2042 to future reviews?


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## W1zzard (Oct 17, 2022)

wheresmycar said:


> @W1zzard any chance adding Battlefield 2042 to future reviews?


No plans, it's always-online, so a huge PITA to test and runs will have too much variance. and then they decide to patch it and all my data will be invalid, oh and it has a terrible Denuvo implementation allowing only five GPU changes per day


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## OneMoar (Oct 17, 2022)

performance improvements in a video card driver?
what is this 2008 ? did w1zzard get a time machine
also can we get a comparison with the release drivers (or close to) for ampere


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## wheresmycar (Oct 17, 2022)

W1zzard said:


> No plans, it's always-online, so a huge PITA to test and runs will have too much variance. and then they decide to patch it and all my data will be invalid, oh and it has a terrible Denuvo implementation allowing only five GPU changes per day



that makes sense. Thats odd, B2042 without campaign mode... looks like i haven't done enough homework on this one


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## nomdeplume (Oct 17, 2022)

R0H1T said:


> Well I had major instability on the 3080, reverted back to last "stable" studio drivers!



I went back as well after an immediately noticeable dip in color and picture quality on my desktop background.  There was nothing in the Nvidia control panel that could've been changed to a less desirable setting to explain this.  Even the older driver still looks flat compared to the pre-install conditions I was highly favorable of.


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## wheresmycar (Oct 17, 2022)

OneMoar said:


> performance improvements in a video card driver?
> what is this 2008 ? did w1zzard get a time machine
> also can we get a comparison with the release drivers (or close to) for ampere



Yep he travelled back in time and somehow ended up in NVIDIAs HQ  "driver performance capping" meeting in 2008. I managed to sneak into his office and grab one of the recordings - _"ok boysss... lets cap em until we stack em..... should AMD come knocking on our doors 14 years later, crack open those confines and release the remaining juice" - _i'm still deciphering the code, looks like a GPU and Juice maker in one for those hot summer days


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## R-T-B (Oct 17, 2022)

nomdeplume said:


> I went back as well after an immediately noticeable dip in color and picture quality on my desktop background.  There was nothing in the Nvidia control panel that could've been changed to a less desirable setting to explain this.  Even the older driver still looks flat compared to the pre-install conditions I was highly favorable of.


sounds like you went from hdmi full color to hdmi limited.


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## Hugis (Oct 17, 2022)

woohoo time to break out the 1080ti, lol


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## bhappy (Oct 18, 2022)

Do you have any data regarding minimum fps or 99th percentile fps? I think it would be very interesting to see if there are any improvements to these metrics.


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## maxli86 (Oct 18, 2022)

The only bug I noticed is GPU-Z detected that my Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB have raytracing? 
However not useable when I try to run Doom Eternal so I don't know why GPU-Z shows raytracing as supported.


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## Tek-Check (Oct 18, 2022)

Nice bump with drivers only. I wonder if new drivers can make a better use of *resizable BAR* too? Has this been tested by anyone?
I remember that Steve from HUB tested Ampere vs RDNA2 some time ago. Ampere cards had some wierd regressions in several popular games.


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## nomdeplume (Oct 18, 2022)

R-T-B said:


> sounds like you went from hdmi full color to hdmi limited.



Will look into that further.


Decided to reexamine what I had thought a driver mismatch and had moved on from.  Directly next to the file on my drive was NVCleaninstall.  Which I used for the first time installing 522.25. 

So I did a clean install of the .exe alone.  I have suspicions in numerous directions what toned down color representation (22H2).  

Edit: Vibrancy setting in Nvidia control panel brought back some life.  I need to worry more about getting a monitor from the current decade than discomfort making display settings in numerous places.


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## Verpal (Oct 18, 2022)

Only small annoyance is NVIDIA clearly hold the driver to the last minute just to inflate the Ampere review number a bit, but hey, not complaining, free performance is free, and I have long thought NVIDIA have given up on Pascal folks, looks like 1080ti will rock on!


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## DemonicRyzen666 (Oct 18, 2022)

How come no one records launch driver vs other drivers or even end of life drivers? meh oh well.


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## OneMoar (Oct 18, 2022)

it should be possible to benchmark battlefield 2042 there is a conquest-solo mode
Or a custom portal mode


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## Delta6326 (Oct 18, 2022)

Thank you for including the 1080 ti. Glad to see my card is still going strong in 1080p segment. As my system is ageing I can always use any gains possible.
Currently planning Intel 13th Gen, possibly RDNA 3 and maybe sometime in 2023 I'll go 1440p.
Currently my CPU is finally starting to feel sluggish and going from 100%GPU/70%CPU to a near flip of that on newer titles.


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## qubit (Oct 18, 2022)

Interesting, good to see free performance improvements on offer, however slight. I've already installed it.

My venerable 780 Ti supports DX12, so it would have also been interesting to see if that had any performance improvements too. Alas, the card is no longer supported with driver updates so that's not happening.


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## Flydommo (Oct 18, 2022)

The additional FPS are very welcome on my trusty old GTX 1080Ti.


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## anachron (Oct 18, 2022)

Ware said:


> I checked a few games myself before and after updating to these drivers and saw no improvement on my 3070@1440.
> Division 2 DX12 showed <1% difference gain is FPS, though the CPU graph was slightly smoother.
> Other DX11(Hunt, Steep) and Vulkan(Rage 2, WWZ) games had no gains.
> I didn't change any settings or test other resolutions so YMMV.
> ...


I got a 7% gain on Cyberpunk 2077 in 1440p with my 2070 Super and i'm still on an old bios with no Resizable BAR support on my motherboard. That's not too far from this review results, so it doesn't seems that Resizable BAR support got a big impact on the performance gain.


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## solarmystic (Oct 18, 2022)

A game that's not in TPU's test suite, *Horizon Zero Dawn* scored noticeable gains in all metrics on my *12400F/2080 TI* system moving from *516.94 to 522.25*. Absolutely worth upgrading to, especially if you're still playing this game. I daresay this driver is as good as the previous performance champ, *511.79* for older cards.

For example, at 1080p Ultimate, *Average FPS *went up from *134 *on 516.94 to *141* on 522.25, but more crucially, 1% CPU and GPU low FPS went up by *7* and *15 *respectively. Definitely a more smoother experience on this very CPU limited game.

*516.94*






*522.25*


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## Vayra86 (Oct 18, 2022)

OneMoar said:


> it should be possible to benchmark battlefield 2042 there is a conquest-solo mode
> Or a custom portal mode


But why though, franchise is a total crapfest, arguably worse than CoD

I say good riddance for being an always online product.


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## W1zzard (Oct 18, 2022)

solarmystic said:


> Horizon Zero Dawn


Why are people so obsessed with this game? Is terrible programming is now a reference benchmark to represent the typical PC gaming experience?


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## nguyen (Oct 18, 2022)

Nvidia Fine Leather


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## Red_Machine (Oct 18, 2022)

"These are amazing performance gains"
The amazing performance gains: 3-5fps

Am I just jaded, or is this a load of hot air?  Call me back when there's a 20fps bump, then I might be impressed.  Maybe.


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## spajdrEX (Oct 18, 2022)

Days Gone (UE4) is using DX11 only, not DX12.


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## qubit (Oct 18, 2022)

Red_Machine said:


> "These are amazing performance gains"
> The amazing performance gains: 3-5fps
> 
> Am I just jaded, or is this a load of hot air?  Call me back when there's a 20fps bump, then I might be impressed.  Maybe.


I'll second that. I remember the sometimes huge performance gains available yesteryear that left these in the dust.


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## tps3443 (Oct 18, 2022)

Crazy to see how fast a bone stock 3090 actually  is during gameplay. But then again, my overclocked 3090 is putting down 25% higher 3DMark graphics scores than a standard and stock 3090. These cards will hold up for the long haul for sure. Especially when you water cool one, and use the right bios. These GPU‘s are plenty fast! My 3090 Kingpin Is actually 5% faster right out of the box than a 3090Ti FE. I highly considered upgrading to the 4090. But I do play at 2560x1440P. The boost looks to be a solid 50%. That’s not really all that much during real game play when you are already averaging 80-200fps in anything with just a basic stock 3090. Just saying. The 4090 is awesome. But, no rush on upgrading that’s for sure.


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## RainingTacco (Oct 18, 2022)

So it improves the performance in newest DX12 titles, but reduces it in DX11? Why?


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## Kissamies (Oct 18, 2022)

So a little performance boost for 1080 Ti, need to check these out. I hope there's no audio issues with these like I had with 517.48 drivers.


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## wolf (Oct 18, 2022)

> We keep hearing about "AMD Fine Wine", but it looks like NVIDIA optimizes performance for older drivers, too.


I wonder if NVidia did it, just because we keep hearing about AMD fine wine. Save a bunch of optimizations in one release to maximize media exposure.

And it works.


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## Space Lynx (Oct 18, 2022)

any gains are good gains in my book. well done Nvidia.

@W1zzard 

In the future you may want to color code the bars based on the gpu. the dark greens and light greens make it just a smidge hard to read. like take example God of War below, I almost thought for a second that there was a 30 fps gain in the driver, then I took a closer look, but if you were to say use Blue for both 1080 ti graphics, one blue bold one light blue, then light green and dark green for 2080 ti, and then say red bold/light for the 3090, i think it would be easier for the end user to read it.  just my two cents, I don't actually care, just trying to help


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## Ware (Oct 18, 2022)

mahirzukic2 said:


> That's the thing, that's why we have reviews on the TPU, and they have found out there were increases from 1 - 2.5%, and that's just using some games. If you included more games, you'd probably see it is a wash, meaning no meaningful gain across the board, but rather some give and take like it usually is with new driver releases.


I'm sorry, but I didn't mean to imply I tested all those games myself - I personally tested only 5.
I wasn't talking about gains from Resizable BAR in general - I was talking about these drivers and those games that were tested(not by me) and showed greater gains, being games that do benefit more than 1-2% from Resizable BAR, and *the possibility that it may have been a contributing factor* to the huge claimed increases such as 24% in AC.



anachron said:


> I got a 7% gain on Cyberpunk 2077 in 1440p with my 2070 Super and i'm still on an old bios with no Resizable BAR support on my motherboard. That's not too far from this review results, so it doesn't seems that Resizable BAR support got a big impact on the performance gain.


Thanks.  This is what I was speculating about.  Your right, that does seem roughly in line with the results here...

I didn't see any info on the test system used to get a 24% gain in AC, and I trust the 17% figure from TPU more - still a huge gain.
The consistent bit I'm seeing is that the biggest gains are from higher end cards at lower resolutions(3090@1080).


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## OneMoar (Oct 18, 2022)

W1zzard said:


> Why are people so obsessed with this game? Is terrible programming is now a reference benchmark to represent the typical PC gaming experience?


Have you Not played a video game recently?
Terrible Programing is the Default


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## LifeOnMars (Oct 18, 2022)

qubit said:


> I'll second that. I remember the sometimes huge performance gains available yesteryear that left these in the dust.


I suppose we could argue maybe that the drivers are more optimised from the get-go nowadays leaving less wiggle room. Also, most modern cards are pushed to the max at stock (undervolting helps efficiency) whereas overclocking in the past meant significant gains (Lovingly remembers the old pencil mod on my HD 4850 lol)


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## tps3443 (Oct 18, 2022)

LifeOnMars said:


> I suppose we could argue maybe that the drivers are more optimised from the get-go nowadays leaving less wiggle room. Also, most modern cards are pushed to the max at stock (undervolting helps efficiency) whereas overclocking in the past meant significant gains (Lovingly remembers the old pencil mod on my HD 4850 lol)



Overclocking today still offers MASSIVE gains. I get huge numbers from my hardware. Some more than others. I’ve been overclocking since well before the ATI 4850. But yeah you can get great performance out of GPU’s and CPU’s. My last generation 2080Ti was a whopping 30% faster than a RTX3070 in rasterization performance benchmarks like Firestrike or Timespy. That was a GPU that matches and even beats the 2080Ti. The same goes for RTX3090’s. You can squeeze a solid 18-23%. My 11900K CPU scores 25% higher Cinebench multithreaded scores than the PC Gamer magazine review of it. Overclocking is alive and well, it just changes. now a days it’s all about having low temps and good cooling.


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## Dr. Dro (Oct 19, 2022)

qubit said:


> Interesting, good to see free performance improvements on offer, however slight. I've already installed it.
> 
> My venerable 780 Ti supports DX12, so it would have also been interesting to see if that had any performance improvements too. Alas, the card is no longer supported with driver updates so that's not happening.



I don't believe many gains would show up, Kepler doesn't _really_ support DirectX 12, it's restricted to feature level 11_0 so only the subset of hardware accelerated features supported by DirectX 11.0 (the original Windows 7 DX11) are available, its DDI was simply updated to support D3D12 instances, the same goes for Fermi... and they are rather limited at that.

The first-generation GCN would support 11_1 features and from GCN 2 onwards, basic true DX12 support is available with 12_0 feature level. NVIDIA went from 11_0 straight to 12_1 with Maxwell 2 (GM200 and GM204), even though AMD fans would joke NVIDIA did not support async compute (they did; the hardware was just hilariously bad at it) - it was GCN that was slightly behind in features. Alas, even today it is not rare that "DX12" games run on Kepler or the original GCN, just because the hardware features aren't actually required by the engine. Death Stranding and Red Dead Redemption 2 are the only games on the top of my head that do not boot on 11_0 and 11_1 hardware.






W1zzard said:


> Why are people so obsessed with this game? Is terrible programming is now a reference benchmark to represent the typical PC gaming experience?



That game is so good! But at the same time, I suppose people also want to benchmark Cyberpunk 2077 (which is an even worse mess and unlike Horizon, it is not even a good game) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


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## nguyen (Oct 19, 2022)

Dr. Dro said:


> That game is so good! But at the same time, I suppose people also want to benchmark Cyberpunk 2077 (which is an even worse mess and unlike Horizon, it is not even a good game) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯



CP2077 is extremely optimized for PC (high end PC to be precise), meanwhile Horizon is a shitty port (Death Stranding was much better port)


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## Dr. Dro (Oct 19, 2022)

nguyen said:


> CP2077 is extremely optimized for PC (high end PC to be precise), meanwhile Horizon is a shitty port (Death Stranding was much better port)



LOL, we must not have played the same game. The one that would crash every five minutes, with Big Rigs quality animation, tons of script errors and low teens frame rate unless I enabled DLSS with a then brand new 3090... High end PCs being able to power through the mess after almost 2 years of fixes (hey at least they didn't hit and run) doesn't mean it's optimized.

Cyberpunk left an extreme negative impression on me.


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## nguyen (Oct 19, 2022)

Dr. Dro said:


> LOL, we must not have played the same game. The one that would crash every five minutes, with Big Rigs quality animation, tons of script errors and low teens frame rate unless I enabled DLSS with a then brand new 3090... High end PCs being able to power through the mess after almost 2 years of fixes (hey at least they didn't hit and run) doesn't mean it's optimized.
> 
> Cyberpunk left an extreme negative impression on me.



I played like 100h+ of CP2077 a week after it launched, almost flawless experience, the visual more than make up for low but smooth FPS. CP2077 will crash within minutes if you have unstable overclock, it is the best tool to find the stable clock for me ever since.

Horizon had terrible shader compilation stutters and horrible looking TAA (grass shimmering) for a long time before they were fixed, so yeah, high and stuttery FPS with shitty visual is nothing to compliment about.

Anyways there is Death Stranding in the test suit, no need for Horizon to be included


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## Dr. Dro (Oct 19, 2022)

nguyen said:


> I played like 100h+ of CP2077 a week after it launched, almost flawless experience, the visual more than make up for low but smooth FPS. CP2077 will crash within minutes if you have unstable overclock, it is the best tool to find the stable clock for me ever since.
> 
> Horizon had terrible shader compilation stutters and horrible looking TAA (grass shimmering) for a long time before they were fixed, so yeah, high and stuttery FPS with shitty visual is nothing to compliment about.
> 
> Anyways there is Death Stranding in the test suit, no need for Horizon to be included



Yeah nah, back at launch at least it wasn't overclocking, just the game's exceptionally poor programming. Crowbcat video on Cyberpunk was exactly the experience I had, and at the time I was running the exact same specs I have today except I had a 3900XT processor. I might give it another chance after the expansion packs release, but to call it bad was being nice


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## lexluthermiester (Oct 20, 2022)

OneMoar said:


> it should be possible to benchmark battlefield 2042 there is a conquest-solo mode
> Or a custom portal mode


That requires an online presence. W1zzard doesn't test that way.



W1zzard said:


> Why are people so obsessed with this game? Is terrible programming is now a reference benchmark to represent the typical PC gaming experience?


I'm with them on that one, it's a fun and popular game. Easy to test with. And if it is poorly programed, that would make it an excellent benchmark.


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## GameZenChill (Oct 22, 2022)

Thanks for doing these Driver Performance Analysis benchmarks ! 

I'm kind of new here. Are these a regular feature or something that happens if there's a major impact ?


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## nexxusty (Oct 22, 2022)

R0H1T said:


> Well I had major instability on the 3080, reverted back to last "stable" studio drivers!


That's your PC, not the drivers.

Not a single issue on my end with multiple GPU's


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## R0H1T (Oct 22, 2022)

Right, because you know my PC was "unstable" before this


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## KLiKzg (Nov 18, 2022)

Too bad you did not also test Maxwell 1.0, a.k.a. several 7xx & 9xx cards.


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