Conclusion

First, the good news—the GeForce 522.25 drivers are an absolute must-have. You stand to get a performance bonus that lives up to NVIDIA's driver changelog, which claimed performance improvements for RTX 30-series "Ampere" graphics cards in DirectX 12 games. But this is where NVIDIA isn't telling us the whole truth. We found that these performance gains extend to even the RTX 20-series "Turing" and GTX 10-series "Pascal" graphics cards. And now the better news—these gains aren't confined to DirectX 12, we've seen improvements in performance even with DirectX 11 and Vulkan titles.

Why NVIDIA limited its driver changelog to claiming performance gains only with RTX 30-series is anyone's guess—maybe because RTX 20-series and GTX 10-series are end-of-life (except for the RTX 2060 12 GB and GTX 1030 that launched in 2022); or maybe they have a mountain of RTX 30-series cards that they want to sell—we don't know. NVIDIA Release Notes PDFs of late tend to be disorganized, with information scattered across different pages. For example, there's almost always changes that are not listed in the official PDF, but that the NVIDIA Game Ready blog post talks about, so we have to puzzle things together for our news coverage.

Regardless, there's a lot more good than bad happening in this article, and we see NVIDIA's claimed performance gains materializing to a little over 2% for the RTX 3090, when averaged across all 25 games, DirectX 12 or otherwise. For the RTX 3090, we see serious performance gains in titles such as Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and Halo Infinite, which are DirectX 12 titles. Not all DirectX 12 titles provide a notable performance improvement though—Days Gone, a DirectX 12 title powered by Unreal Engine 4 no less, is exhibiting performance losses. While the losses themselves are quite small and won't affect gameplay in any way, this is something that shouldn't be happening with a driver that aims to improve performance across the board. Other DirectX 12 titles such as Civilization VI, Dying Light 2, Guardians of the Galaxy etc., lodge negligible performance gains.

Things get interesting with the RTX 2080 Ti "Turing," which does post the same massive Assassin's Creed Valhalla performance gain we see with the RTX 3090; but also goes on to post gains with Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and Forza Horizon 5. What's interesting is that the 2080 Ti has its biggest performance gains with Halo Infinite, a title that only has modest gains with the RTX 3090. To a lesser extent we also see this with Total War: Warhammer III—a DirectX 11 title, but more on this later. Battlefield V (DirectX 11 mode) posts small performance losses, as does Days Gone, just like it did with the RTX 3090. One thing is for sure from our testing—GeForce 522.25 measurably improves performance for RTX 20-series "Turing."

Going back one more generation, testing the GTX 1080 Ti "Pascal" from 2016, we're surprised to see that not only are there some performance gains to be had, but they're across the board, no matter how small. There are games that stick out, such as Assassin's Creed Valhalla and Control, but the performance losses we'd seen with Battlefield V and Days Gone aren't to be found. Averaged across all games, we get a net 1.6% performance gain. Since there isn't any performance regression anywhere, GTX 10-series "Pascal" owners should just grab these drivers without second thought, they offer free performance. We keep hearing about "AMD Fine Wine", but it looks like NVIDIA optimizes performance for older drivers, too.

The next aspect of our testing was to check if performance gains are to be had only with DirectX 12 titles, or also apply to games using DirectX 11 or Vulkan, and here we see surprising results. Games like The Witcher 3 and Warhammer III post performance gains depending on the card used, despite being DirectX 11 based. With RTX 2080 Ti, Battlefield V lost some performance running in the DirectX 11 mode. Red Dead Redemption 2 (DX12 mode) actually gained some performance with the RTX 3090, but depending on the resolution, lost a tiny bit of performance with the RTX 2080 Ti and GTX 1080 Ti.

Overall, NVIDIA didn't go in guns blazing, avoiding overselling these performance gains, mostly leaving them buried in their GeForce Game Ready blog post or Release Notes, which is a good thing—we went in with modest expectations. The drivers certainly deliver a performance improvement with "Ampere," which may seem inconsequential for the RTX 3090, but should prove very handy for mainstream SKUs such as the RTX 3050 and RTX 3060. There's something to look forward to even for RTX 20-series owners, which very likely sat out the RTX 30-series and may look to test the longevity of their higher-segment SKUs (RTX 2070 and above). Those still on GTX 10-series, great going, you've made the most of your hardware, and NVIDIA has a little something in store for you, too.

These new drivers do have a bug with Cyberpunk 2077, where you get a corrupted display when opening the map, a manual fix is available from NVIDIA.