Nvidia has released its 344.48 driver to the public and is available now through the usual channels. As well as the usual updates such as improved SLI profiles and support for new games such as Civilization: Beyond Earth, this new driver also adds support for one of Nvidia’s latest technologies, DSR, to all of Nvidia’s cards right down to the trusty old Fermi GPU’s. Hurrah!
DSR, or Dynamic Super Resolution in full, is a technology that was released alongside Nvidia’s 9xx series of GPU’s, and allows your supported Nvidia GPU to render games at a higher resolution than your monitor is capable of, and then using a custom filter downscales that image to one that your monitor can display. For example, using this technology would allow you to render your games at 4K, and then display them on a 1080P monitor. To quote Nvidia, it “enables gamers to enjoy 4K-quality graphics on any HD screen”, assuming your card has the muscle for 4K of course.
So if you’ve got a 4XX card or higher (Nvidia lists GTX500 series cards and above supported in the release post, but then also later on in the post have the 400 series and above supported too, after looking at the driver it seems that it does indeed support 400 series cards too, so it should work for you if you’re still running a trusty old GTX 480 or indeed any of the 400 series) then check out the new driver and let us know what you think. A word of warning though, some users are reporting frame drops in Shadow Of Mordor and SLI issues in Ryse, so if you’re keen on either of those games then any issues you get are quite likely to be driver related.
I’m off to go see how DSR holds up, but what about you? Will you be using DSR or do you think that the image quality is not worth the loss of performance? Let us know.
