A game has to get ‘DLSS enabled’ by a nvidia team, they run the game through a supercomputer over at nvidia to train the model. They include this model in the driver for every game. I think this is required for it to work. This is the same for the whole RTX thing and every other technique nvidia uses and AMD doesn’t.
This is also the image I see when reading the release notes. It also conjures up visions of crazy, hard to maintain driver spaghetti code with screwy conditional logic all over the place.
I can’t help but wonder how much this kind of thing contributes to what seems to be an increasing number of bugs and overall decrease in quality of the Nvidia drivers in recent years.
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yes… DLSS is like “pre-rendered”. But we seen this “support game x” in changelog also before DLSS.
@JWales2895 yeah… exactly… if (GameX ) Then… thats what I have in mind.
Apart from RTX/DLSS support the game ready drivers are only for preconfigured optimized settings in Geforce experience. For instance MSFS worked perfectly before the game ready driver was released.
MSFS will also work perfectly if you install a driver from 2 years ago (not recommended ofcourse for security reasons).
but:
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Yes those just contain the optimised graphics settings almost nobody uses. When that came out i already had a couple of hundred hours in my logbook. 
And it’s probably for advertisement puposes too. Maybe the bigger publishers pay to get their games ‘supported’ by nvidia?
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nobody want to hear these truth ( I assume these was the main optimization of these driver update , and not cheap )
Ps: I must leave the discussion for today 
Do you have inside knowledge on this? I ask out of true interest. “Game Ready” drivers have been around since well before RTX or DLSS existed, and I can remember various release notes that sure seemed to imply game-specific driver optimizations that went beyond GeForce experience profiles.
The release notes of the driver say nothing about game specific tweaks.
I’m not a graphics programmer, but i understood game engines normally don’t have direct access to the graphics driver, because the API (Like DirectX/Vulcan) is in between to guarantee all graphics cards/drivers support all games (which is the case because all games do work regardless of driver version). This sounds logical to me, also i believe the term ‘game ready drivers’ wasn’t a thing before Geforce experience software (with graphics profiles feature) existed.
And also because it seems game ready drivers bring no noticable increase in performance (in various games i beta tested). For instance WoW Shadowlands got its own ‘game ready driver’ on the release date. Nothing changed performance wise but the Geforce experience software came with a new performance profile. And the patch notes had various fixes in it like most releases but nothing game specific.
Here is the new ‘weight watchers’ slimmed version of driver 471.41 for anyone who likes a ‘skinny’ driver!
Although I can’t throw out any specific examples, I can definitely recall past driver releases where ‘game ready’ for a specific game did actually improve the performance and/or fix specific game issues like CTD’s etc.
I would love to know from someone that has insider knowledge just what is actually meant by “game ready”. There are opinions all over the place on this, but I’ve never seen anything definitive, like a clear statement from Nvidia. What I’ve seen from Nvidia reads more like marketing material than a clear technical explanation.
In my “old school” brain, I’ve always thought of drivers & driver API’s as a way to abstract low-level hardware calls away from higher level functions, and as you mentioned, provide a somewhat generic interface for programmers of software (i.e. games) to code against. If Nvidia really is making game-specific driver tweaks as it seems to me that they are doing, and I think that stands even if it’s just enabling RTX/DLSS support, then I think they’ve violated the true hardware driver paradigm. This just seems wrong to me on several levels. With the mess of conditional code that must be in there, it must be real easy to introduce new bugs, and difficult to find and fix them. Plus it doesn’t seem fair to smaller developers that don’t have the leverage to obtain “game ready driver” status.
Some hints:
Update Drivers & Optimal Playable Settings
For each major game release, NVIDIA works closely with developers to boost performance, fix bugs, and improve your gaming experience. Technologies like NVIDIA GameWorks™ give you the tools to optimize gameplay and bring you these improvements through a Game Ready driver update.
And in the page source found here:
Official Advanced Driver Search | NVIDIA
“GRD” Game Ready Drivers provide the best possible gaming experience for all major games. From early access through the lifecycle of the game, NVIDIA’s driver team continues to exhaustively test all major milestones so they can optimize performance, maximize stability, and perfect overall gameplay functionality.
And a forum discussion:
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/creative-apps/26/296943/nvidia-studio-driver-vs-game-ready-driver-which-sh/
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Devs should rather adapt to the driver than Nvidia adapting the driver to various games.
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latest I know was Prepare3D… ( game not started with 466.11 NEW Nvidia Drivers: GeForce WHQL 516.94 - Nvidia has issued a security warning for it's GPU drivers on 4/8/2022) - #377 by MichaMMA , they fixed it with 466.27 )
( may be there is a /en/ side too . I let google translate …)
How are Studio Drivers different from Game Ready Drivers (GRD)?
In 2014, NVIDIA created the Game Ready Driver program to deliver the best gaming experience on Day 0. To achieve this, the release cadence for Game Ready drivers is determined by the release of major new game content so that our drivers team has as much time as possible to work on a specific title. Similarly, NVIDIA now offers the Studio Driver program. Studio Drivers are designed to provide the highest level of functionality and stability for creative applications. They provide comprehensive testing with world-class creative applications and workflows to achieve the best possible performance.
Thus… they made drivers for games… as said: for me it sound like a worst design and no wonder about issues / bugs / etc. within these “drivers”.
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Just after MSFS 2020 was released, Nvidia released a driver which had optimisations for the simulator. It has been widely reported that this modified driver resulted in a significant increase of FPS within the simulator for many people just after the simulator was released. When I say significant, I think there were reports up-to a gain of 10 FPS! This is a rare gain in the world of driver releases. Presumably this would be called a ‘game ready driver’ in relation to MSFS?
Has anyone tried 471.41?
There are so many variables on an individual PC, it’s very difficult to measure any improvements to a game through a new driver release especially, I guess when the real limitation comes from how ‘deep your pocket’ is when it comes to buying hardware. Mine has a hole in it at the moment! 
I never really expect too much from new drivers but occasionally there are some positive gains for people in performance, (VR being one and patches for security issues etc. maybe a few less stutters perhaps).
BRGDS
Charles.
I guess one could always ask Pidge2K from Nvidia who joined this thread recently, for the answers to some worth-while questions. He might not appreciate too many questions especially if the answers can be found on-line. There are probably many he could not answer too.
Charles.
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New driver instantly “broke” my second monitor. Windows sees it, but tells me it is not active and i cant select it in any menu, or change resolution etc. Rolled back and it worked fine again, it is an older monitor but it is useful to me for checklists etc.
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Mine works.
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That’s interesting. I have had problems where I have just had a grey screen with myriads of vertical lines when the PC starts with previous drivers. The monitor was unable to detect the monitor too. If I changed to an HDMI cable then everything was fine. I have brain fuzz at the moment and cannot remember the name of the other GPU connection that I am using. I am getting old! I think it’s called ‘displayport’ ? There is a link in this thread which someone posted where you can report issues to Nvidia. You will have to look back in this thread. This driver does not present those previous problems for me. Anyway, someone from Nvidia has posted in this thread, maybe they are monitoring all the Nvidia threads in different forums. Charles
Using G-Force experience to report problems…
https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4681/related/1
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It is an old Samsung Monitor i connected via a VGA adapter to a display port. I used to get the sparkles things and grey lines to. I could live with it because it worked. I may take a $20 Australian dollar punt and try a HDMI adaptor instead. The monitor is not at fault, works perfectly if I set it up as my main display.
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