NVIDIA beta GPU driver spotted boosting Cyberpunk 2077 frame rates by 23%, but there's a catch

NVIDIA has a new graphics driver in beta which seems to provide a substantial boost to frame rates in Cyberpunk 2077, especially in a test build of Windows 11.

We're talking about the game running 23% faster, in fact, although there's a noteworthy caveat here.

Wccftech spotted that Compusemble on YouTube ran some tests with Cyberpunk 2077 and NVIDIA's beta driver, with DLSS 3 on, and also with frame generation turned off, across different Windows 11 builds (stable and Canary).

The eye-opening discovery was the mentioned 23% uplift in the frame rate which was witnessed with beta driver version 550.9 and Windows 11 preview build 26040 (which just came out for the Canary channel).

What's going on here? Well, this does seem like a performance boost which is too good to be true, and as commenters on YouTube have pointed out, there appears to be something going on with the denoising process, and perhaps bits being skipped over due to a bug in the beta driver (which is entirely possible). As there are grainier graphics in some places, and so this skipping of denoising could be an explanation for the performance gain.

However, that's just for the driver side of the equation, and Compusemble acknowledges this, but points out there's a boost from the OS evident here too.

The YouTuber explains:

"It does look like denoising is being handled differently on each driver, but it's hard to say what impact that has on the difference without patch notes for the driver. There is also an OS related performance boost that can be seen when comparing the same driver on each Windows build with frame generation enabled."

We can't be sure what's going on under the hood exactly, but NVIDIA's next driver - and indeed the Windows 11 build - are definitely worth watching for Cyberpunk 2077 fans, as it looks like some kind of performance boost is in the cards (even if it isn't going to be to the tune of 23%).