A new generation of Nvidia graphics cards launched yesterday (not that you can actually buy any of them), so it’s no surprise that there’s a substantial driver update to go along with them. What is surprising is that said drivers aren’t just for the RTX 50-series, though there’s certainly a lot in there for them. The updates also include performance improvements for previous cards as old as the RTX 2080 from 2018.
PC Gamer notes that in addition to a host of new goodies for the RTX 5080, 5090, and 40-series, enhancements to the enhanced ray reconstruction, super resolution, and deep learning anti-aliasing should boost performance on the RTX 30-series and 20-series, too. Nvidia doesn’t call these cards out in its lengthy blog post for the latest app/driver update, but older cards can indeed take advantage of these new enhancements according to the chart below.
Nvidia
Note that some of these features are still in beta and might need to be manually enabled before you can see benefits.
The newer 40- and 50-series cards get the bulk of the enhancements in the new DLSS 4 model, of course, most notably the much-vaunted frame generation feature. The 50-series can do multi-frame generation with up to four AI-generated frames in between conventionally rendered game frames. It’s a very cool trick, even if some gamers aren’t sold on “fake frames” as a legitimate performance upgrade.
The RTX 5090 is an impressive card, as Brad says in his review. The RTX 5080… not so much. But laying down four figures for a GPU (again, if you can even find one right now) might be a little less painful if you can see Nvidia supporting older hardware almost seven years after release.
