NVIDIA today released the GeForce Software 441.88 WHQL drivers with a few major feature updates. To begin with, the drivers add support for the freshly minted GeForce GTX 1660 Super. NVIDIA updated NULL (NVIDIA Ultra-Low Latency), an input-lag reduction feature, with support for G-Sync. You can now use the two together to make the input latency "cost" of G-Sync practically "free." Next up, NVIDIA updated Freestyle and Ansel with support for ReShade filters, with some riders. You can't use custom ReShade filters in competitive games, but can use some official ReShade filters. Lastly, NVIDIA enhanced its Image Sharpening features to reduce its performance cost, and added support for DirectX 11 - something the competing Radeon Image Sharpening feature lacks.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce Software 441.08 WHQL

The change-log follows.

NVIDIA is taking a somewhat unusual step in that it's integrating a popular tool at a driver level. ReShade has become well--known throughout the gaming community due to the way it can add - sometimes critically - to many games, whether it be purely in an aesthetics, filter-like level (which really takes no toll on performance), or by adding features that were never developed into the engine, such as ambient occlusion, SMAA anti-aliasing, depth-of-field, and others.

The fact that NVIDIA is integrating it on a driver-level will likely do much in putting the tool even more in the eyes of PC gamers. For now, there is no word on whether the available ReShade tools will be available on a manual-import basis, but it's likely these will be curated by NVIDIA's own engineers. You can also likely forget some of the more advanced features of the tool - NVIDIA only talks about "hundreds of filters" being made available, which seems to bypass any other image-enhancing capabilities of the tool other than color grading, contrast enhancements, and such. The new driver with ReShade support will be available next week alongside NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER launch. NVIDIA confirmed that ReShade filters will be supported through GeForce Experience using NVIDIA Freestyle and Ansel technologies.

NVIDIA's efforts with Quake 2 RTX haven't gone unnoticed in the community, providing a distinct overhaul in image quality to the now decades-old game. Raytracing and its global illumination capabilities have already been well explored in this publication, and its effect in older games - the ones that already run remarkably well in modern hardware - has been well documented, with some third party solutions (such as ReShade) including the effect to great measure in a number of games that haven't been built from the ground-up for raytracing.

The new Lightspeed Studios from NVIDIA aims to bring Quake 2 RTX-like improvements to other games. A job posting from the company dated from the end of September seems to make it clear that the company is looking to increase the number of games with RTX support in this way. Read on after the break for the description in the job listing.

Generic post-processing injector, ReShade, which offers SMAA anti-aliasing, screen space ambient occlusion, depth of field, and many other effects, has been updated to version 4.0. More than just a version update the ReShade FX compiler has received a complete overhaul having been made fully standalone as of this release. These changes bring performance improvements, better error recovery, improved support for code features, and even opens up the ability to add Vulkan support since it can now generate HLSL, GLSL, and SPIR-V. With a change-log packed with enhancements changes and new features, Crosire, the author also reworked the UI. Not only can the new UI be customized by the user, but it also includes new features such as an in-game code editor and texture preview.

While it should be noted that due to the compiler change some effects may no longer compile or work properly in version 4.0. However, these effects just need to be updated by their authors to work with the latest release. Going forward it is likely smaller revisions and updates will be forthcoming with a version 4.0.1 already having surfaced with further fixes. Sadly, even with these quick fixes, teething issues continue beyond the few broken effects by other authors. Some games like Diablo 2 and Arma 3 are proving problematic for some users of the latest ReShade version. Even so, with further updates should see these issues resolved, however for those enjoying those two games, in particular, can roll back to 3.4.1 which remains a fairly stable release.The Change-log follows.