Nvidia has released a lot of small incremental driver updates for the 465-series drivers since late March 2021. 465.89 at the end of March, 466.11 and 466.27 in April, 466.47 and its hotfix 466.55 in May, 466.63 and its hotfix 466.74, and now 466.77 and its hotfix 466.79.
From my own personal experience, 466.11 was good, performed well and was stable. I stuck with it up until just recently. The other smaller increments all introduced performance problems and stability issues, not just for MSFS but for many other games as well.
When patch 1.16.2.0 (Sim Update IV) was released, and still being on 466.11, I saw a pretty significant performance loss.
Just before WU5 was released I decided to test out some of the other hotfix drivers to see if it helped out at all in MSFS. After some trial and error I have settled on 466.74 (the 466.63 hotfix driver). I am now getting fantastic performance in MSFS again, even on 1.17.3.0 World Update V.
Both 466.77 and its hotfix 466.79 did not perform as well for me, but .79 did work just fine. I’m just getting better performance with .74. 466.63 had quite a few issues and problems for a lot of people, but this hotfix seems to have resolved all those and now is a great performer and very stable. Being .77/.79 were mostly just to introduce support for 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti GPUs, you’re not really missing out on anything by not using them unless you have one of said Ti GPUs.
It’s worth a shot to try this driver out if you’re really suffering with performance. Couldn’t hurt to try at least. Be sure you properly DDU your previous driver before downgrading/upgrading the driver.
This probably wont help the vast majority of people, but there might be a few that see noticeable performance gains like myself.
You can get the driver from this page: 466.74
It’s not available on the main GeForce Drivers download page. The link is to the Official GeForce Hotfix Driver page.
My hardware specs:
i7-9700K
32GB
2060 Super 8GB
2560x1440 144Hz G-Sync Certified monitor on DisplayPort cable
Full Screen, 2560x1440, V-Sync Off in-game settings (G-Sync enabled through driver)
MSFS installed on SATA SSD
Steam release