The First Descendant GeForce Game Ready Driver Released

By Andrew Burnes on June 27, 2024 | Featured Stories Drivers

Our latest GeForce Game Ready Driver delivers the definitive day-one experience in The First Descendant, a highly anticipated new DLSS 3.5 title, and gets your system ready for PAYDAY 3’s DLSS 3 update.

Additionally, there’s support for 4 new Optimal Playable Settings profiles.

Download and install our new Game Ready Driver from the Drivers tab of the NVIDIA app beta, GeForce Experience or GeForce.com, and read on to learn more.

Game Ready For The First Descendant, Featuring DLSS 3.5 with Ray Reconstruction, Reflex & Ray Tracing

The First Descendant is a free, third-person cooperative action-RPG shooter powered by Unreal Engine 5. Experience the fun of strategic boss fights through 4-player co-op, using an extensive range of unique characters, with exciting gunplay, and looting. Battle through the engrossing story, and tackle World Missions against huge bosses in The First Descendant.

 

When The First Descendant launches July 2nd, it will feature out of the box support for NVIDIA DLSS 3.5 with Ray Reconstruction, NVIDIA DLAA, NVIDIA Reflex, and several ray traced effects, ensuring GeForce RTX gamers receive the definitive experience.

 

DLSS Super Resolution enables all GeForce RTX users to accelerate frame rates, while DLSS Frame Generation gives GeForce RTX 40 Series users the power of frame rate multiplication, for even faster performance. Our most recent advancement, DLSS 3.5, introduces Ray Reconstruction, a new AI model that creates higher quality ray-traced images for intensive ray-traced games and apps.

This enhanced AI-powered neural renderer improves ray-traced image quality for all GeForce RTX GPUs by replacing hand-tuned denoisers with an NVIDIA supercomputer-trained AI network that generates higher-quality pixels in between sampled rays.

Trained with 5X more data than DLSS 3, using offline-rendered images that require far more computational power than can be delivered during a real-time game, DLSS 3.5 recognizes different ray-traced effects to make smarter decisions about using temporal and spatial data, and to retain high frequency information for superior-quality upscaling. The results are superior to using hand-tuned denoisers, delivering higher fidelity ray-traced effects.

Working in tandem with DLSS Super Resolution and DLSS Frame Generation, Ray Reconstruction maximizes image quality and performance across all GeForce RTX GPUs, delivering the absolute best experience in ray-traced games.

To amp up the visuals while exploring and battling, The First Descendant features ray-traced reflections, ray-traced ambient occlusion, and ray-traced shadows. Shiny surfaces, character armor, glass and bodies of water boast realistic reflections, ambient occlusion shading is significantly improved, and shadows gain extra detail and fidelity throughout the game. With the dedicated Ray Tracing Cores found only on GeForce RTX GPUs, your performance when cranking up image quality will be at the highest possible levels.

And with NVIDIA Reflex, GeForce gamers can reduce PC latency in The First Descendant, making gameplay even more responsive.

Since its debut in September 2020, NVIDIA Reflex has reduced system latency in over 100 games, and over 90% of GeForce gamers have enabled Reflex. 9 of the top 10 competitive shooters feature Reflex support, along with critically acclaimed co-op and single-player games - in 2023 alone, GeForce gamers played over 10 billion hours of their favorite titles with increased responsiveness thanks to Reflex’s innovative system latency reducing technology.

 

To ensure your system is optimized and performant from the second you start playing The First Descendant, download and install our latest GeForce Game Ready Driver from GeForce.com, GeForce Experience, or the NVIDIA app beta.

Game Ready For PAYDAY 3’s DLSS 3 & Reflex Update

Step out of retirement and back into a life of crime in the shoes of the Payday Gang, the nightmare of law-enforcement wherever they go. Several years after the crew’s reign of terror over Washington DC has ended, they assemble once again to deal with the threat that’s roused them out of early retirement, in Deep Silver and Starbreeze Studios’ PAYDAY 3.

Today, PAYDAY 3 introduces support for DLSS 3 and Reflex as part of their new Boys in Blue update, having already included support for both DLSS 2 and DLAA.

At 4K, our heisting frame rates multiplied by 2X with max settings enabled, allowing for 120 FPS+ gameplay on the GeForce RTX 4070, and up to 235 FPS gameplay on the GeForce RTX 4090:

At 2560x1440 and 1920x1080, performance increases by 1.5X, enabling all GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs to hit ludicrous speeds with all settings maxed out:

And with NVIDIA Reflex, system latency was lowered by up to 55%, making gameplay more responsive.

Optimal Settings For New Games

One-click optimal settings in GeForce Experience and the NVIDIA app enable you to instantly configure game options for your system’s hardware, giving you smooth, optimized gameplay. Over 1200 titles are supported, and since our last driver release we’ve added support for 4 more:

  • Bodycam
  • EA SPORTSTM F1 24
  • Pax Dei
  • Soulmask

GeForce Game Ready Driver - Download Now

Learn more about GeForce Game Ready Drivers here, and download the new GeForce Game Ready 556.12 WHQL driver through GeForce Experience, the NVIDIA app beta, or from GeForce.com.

If you experience any technical issues with the new Game Ready drivers please post a detailed report on the GeForce.com Driver Feedback Forum, where our Customer Care team can best assist you. And if you’re looking for a full list of fixes in this driver, for previously-reported issues, head here.