NVIDIA's latest game ready driver 616.56 reportedly delivers up to an 8.1% performance improvement in path tracing workloads, making this one of the rare times where an NVIDIA driver brings noteworthy performance improvements over previous driver iterations. The performance improvements were discovered by PC hardware enthusiast Osvaldo Pinali Doederlein on X, who benchmarked the driver with an RTX 5080 in Geekbench 7, Blender, and 3DMark.
3DMark's path tracing test is where the headline 8.1% performance result was achieved. In Geekbench 7, performance improved by up to 5.5% in its CUDA test and 21.7% in its OpenCL test. Blender saw a 6.1% improvement in version 5.2.0, and Cinebench R26 saw a 6.7% improvement in its GPU benchmarking mode.
However, the driver offers very minimal performance improvements in games and AI workloads, which will be disappointing mostly to gamers. Doederlein recorded a mere 2% performance improvement in Horizon Forbidden West, and 2.5% uplift in Dying Light 2. Similarly, in 3DMark gaming-focused Steel Nomad and Speedway benchmarks, the performance uplift for both with driver 616.56 was only 1.8% and 2.5% respectively.
Driver 616.56 performance benefits won't be beneficial to most gamers out there, but for the niche group who use path tracing regularly, driver 616.56 is worth installing for the extra performance in games that take advantage of path-traced graphics. Power users and professionals who use CUDA and OpenCL applications will also benefit greatly from this update.
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Which specific workloads showed the largest gains with NVIDIA driver 616.56 (path tracing, CUDA, OpenCL, Blender, Cinebench), and what were the reported percentage improvements for each?
Does driver 616.56 include any game support or bug fixes beyond performance improvements, and which games were explicitly added?
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Driver version 616.56 is the latest update from NVIDIA that added support for Star Wars Zero Company, Hell Let Loose: Vietnam, Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, and seven bug fixes in addition to the aforementioned performance improvements. However, it has not been an entirely perfect driver update; a plethora of reports on Reddit have revealed issues with driver stability, primarily surrounding display flickering and black screens. If you experience any of these issues, it's worth reverting to the previous driver and waiting for NVIDIA to fix the issues in their next driver update.
