Newer Nvidia drivers bring significant gaming performance boost to RTX 30 GPUs

A few weeks ago, Nvidia released a graphics driver that significantly improved DX12 gaming performance for RTX 30 series graphics cards. While preparing for upcoming reviews, we've been re-benchmarking on the latest drivers, and it brings to light an important note for upcoming RTX 4080 reviews.

When reading reviews for the RTX 4080, it'll be important to double-check the driver version being used. Some may reuse comparison data from RTX 4090 launch reviews, but due to the improvements made in driver version 522.25 and newer, the gen-on-gen performance gap between RTX 40 and RTX 30 has shrunk. For a true representation of the gen-on-gen increase in performance, we'll need new benchmark results using the latest drivers.

Old data from our day-one RTX 4090 review:

Updated data using the latest drivers:

In the charts above, you can see how much the comparison between the RTX 3090 Ti and the RTX 4090 has changed since our launch day 4090 review, using driver version 521.90. The RTX 4090 still blazes past the last-gen card, but the gap has shrunk a bit thanks to additional optimisations introduced for RTX 30 GPUs in newer driver versions. The new card didn't get slower, but older cards definitely got faster.

Here are some of the games we retested on the RTX 3090 Ti and how much performance changed at each resolution:

• Assassin's Creed Valhalla – 13% at 1080p, 11% at 1440p and 3% at 4K
• Cyberpunk 2077 – 18% at 1080p, 11% at 1440p and 4% at 4K
• Dying Light 2: Stay Human – 8% at 1080p, 6% at 1440p and 5% at 4K
• Horizon Zero Dawn: 8% at 1080p, 6% at 1440p, 2% at 4K

The RTX 4080 will no doubt be a big upgrade over the RTX 3080, but old data using drivers from a month ago will likely make the card look like a bigger upgrade than it is.

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KitGuru Says: The RTX 4080 is launching next week, so expect to see an influx of reviews too.

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