When NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti this past week they also launched their recently announced DX12 Game Ready drivers poised to improve the DX12 gaming experience byan average 16%. Something to consider when seeing this statement, which seemed to get missed by a few, was that this average improvement was over the initial launch of these titles comparing then to now. So other than driver improvements the games could very well have seen improvements from updates on their end as well. Regardless, we were interested in those claims so we set out to test to see what real improvements there were, not from the games launch drivers but rather the last set of drivers 378.66 to the new 378.78.

courtesy of geforce.com

Testing Methodology

For our DX12 testing I wanted to take a moment and thank the guys at CustomPCReview again for helping develop a tool that will now allow us to deliver the same level of results for DX12 and Vulkan as we have with DX11. DX12 tests were conducted with OCATand once the runs are all completed three times the averages for average FPS, 1% low, and .1% low are taken and plotted. We use 1% and .1% lows rather than absolute minimum as the absolute minimum typically represents an outlier frame and doesn’t usually represent actual gameplay. For these tests we ran all the games at 1440p.

X99 Test System