Nvidia’s 441.87 driver brings Max Frame Rate settings

Nvidia's 441.87 Game Ready Drivers are here in time for CES, and they come with a few features more notable than the usual game optimizations. Along with support for Wolfenstein: Youngblood's new raytracing options, the driver brings max frame rate settings and variable rate supersampling for virtual reality.

The new Max Frame Rate setting is the real headliner here, and it offers myriad benefits depending on your application. On the laptop side of things, this feature can extend battery life. If you run a game like Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition with uncapped frames, you'll hear your fan running like crazy and flames will shoot out the back of your computer. Chances are, your monitor can't display 400-plus frames per second, so you're wasting a lot of power with those extra frames. Nvidia says the setting works in concert with Battery Boost and Whisper Mode, too; enabling one of these alongside Max Frame Rate will cap the framerate to the lowest of the two.

Max Frame Rate can help with system latency, too, which sounds useful for fans of competitive and eSports-style games. Nvidia recommends setting this feature to "prefer maximum performance" in the control panel. Set your Max Frame Rate setting to slightly below your average FPS, and your Low Latency Mode to Ultra. This puts the emphasis on processing your frames as quickly as possible to provide even frame timing.

Finally, those looking for the smoothest experience on VRR displays will get something out of this feature, too. First, set the Max Frame Rate slightly below the maximum refresh rate of their display. Then, to max things out, turn VSYNC on and set Low Latency Mode to Ultra.

Variable Rate Supersampling & More

Along with this swiss-army-knife feature, though, Nvidia is offering a few more features in the 441.87 Game Ready Driver. Variable Rate Supersampling is a new technique meant to improve image quality in VR games, Nvidia says. It uses Nvidia's Variable Rate Shader feature, similar to that described for the Xbox Series X. VRS focuses your GPU's processing power on the parts of the screen you're most likely to be looking at. As shown in the image above, the outer parts of the image are rendered at lower fidelity. Especially in VR, this feature makes sense, since the outer parts of the image fade quickly into peripheral vision.

Variable Rate Supersampling will apply up to 8x supersampling to the center of your vision in the VR headset while keeping the framerate of the game above the 90Hz refresh rate of VR headsets. Change this setting from Adaptive to "Always On" to that 8x supersampling all the time.

The drivers also bring a new "Freestyle Splitscreen Filter." This GeForce Experience feature lets you adjust the look of your game after post-processing filters in real-time. Nvidia says this works in over 700 games; hit Alt+F3 to access it in those games. Nvidia says that you can also import hundreds of customization filters from ReShade, putting to rest concerns about whether adding driver-level reshade functionality would be an Nvidia-dictated experience or not.

If you're running an RTX card, you'll also want to make note of the Game Ready-specific enhancements for Wolfenstein: Youngblood's new raytracing update and for Quake II RTX's v1.3 update.

The driver also brings optimized playable settings for more games, support for 8 additional G-Sync Compatible displays, and enhancements to Nvidia's built-in image sharpening.

This is a beefy driver update that we'll likely be digging through for weeks to come.

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