NVIDIA Claims A Massive 93% Boost In Baldur's Gate 3 With Latest Game-Ready GPU Driver
It didn't take long for Baldur's Gate 3 to rise in the ranks on Steam following its exit from Early Access—It's currently the third-most played game with over 500,000 concurrent players at the time of this writing, after peaking at 814,666 (which also ranks third behind Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive). Suffice to say, a lot of people are playing and for those with GeForce hardware, a potentially impressive performance boost awaits with the latest 'Game Ready' GPU driver (536.99 WHQL).
This is an interesting situation because Baldur's Gate 3 has been available to play on PC for nearly three years, dating back to its Early Access launch. NVIDIA is quick to point out that it's been supported by its Game Ready drivers since that time. However, the 536.99 WHQL driver package introduces "additional optimizations and enhancements to further improve" performance.
The biggest one appears to be better DLSS support. We have not run out own benchmarks yet, but according to NVIDIA, GeForce owners can expect up to a nearly two-fold jump in performance when flipping on DLSS.
Source: NVIDIA
"On PC, get the definitive experience with a GeForce RTX graphics card, or play in the cloud on GeForce NOW. Whichever way you play, you can max out graphical quality with NVIDIA DLAA, or crank up the frame rate with NVIDIA DLSS 2—in our benchmarks, GeForce RTX 40 series desktop graphics cards increased their performance by an average of 93%," NVIDIA says.
NVIDIA's data is based on running the game at 4K (3840x2160) with the visual quality settings maxed out. It's also comparing DLSS 2 versus no DLSS, as opposed to a straight-up 93% performance boost from the driver alone.
Still, that's impressive if NVIDIA's numbers hold up. It's also notable that these gains are coming by way of DLSS 2 and not DLSS 3, the latter of which is exclusive to the GeForce RTX 40 series. While the benchmarks apply specifically to the GeForce RTX 40 series (excluding the regular GeForce RTX 4060), NVIDIA says "those with comparable cards" can achieve over 60 frames per second in Baldur's Gate 3 at 4K with every setting maxed out and DLSS 2 turned on.
Additionally, the latest Game Ready driver release is optimized for two other titles that will release with DLSS 2 support: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (releases August 18) and Gord (releases August 17).
NVIDIA also added support for GeForce Experience's one-click optimal settings option for a handful of games. New additions include Exoprimal, Jagged Alliance 3, Lost Judgement, Portal: Prelude RTX, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, and Remnant 2.
You can grab the latest driver release through GeForce Experience or from NVIDIA's driver download page.
