Mere days after the release of Game Ready driver 532.03 (optimized for The Lord of the Rings: Gollum), NVIDIA has now pushed another driver release, version 535.98, which delivers optimizations for the System Shock remake (out now) and Diablo IV (out on June 6th, though early access begins on June 2nd). As always, the new Game Ready driver is available for download via GeForce Experience or manually at this link.

　　NVIDIA struck a significant partnership with Blizzard on Diablo IV. There's a bundle offer that allows purchases of GeForce RTX 40 GPUs at select retailers to earn a complimentary Battle.net code for the game and four in-game items to be unlocked in various Blizzard games (Light-Bearer Mount and Caparison of Faith Armor in Diablo IV, Inarius Wings and Inarius Murloc Pet in Diablo III, Amalgam Rage Mount in World of Warcraft, and Umber Winged Darkness Cosmetics Set in Diablo Immortal).

　　The game also supports NVIDIA DLSS 2 (Super Resolution), NVIDIA DLSS 3 (Frame Generation), and NVIDIA DLAA. Diablo IV already runs smoothly on its own, but owners of GeForce RTX 40 graphics cards can literally fly with the frame rate if they enable Super Resolution and Frame Generation at the same time. On the other hand, they may want to swap DLSS 2 for DLAA to get better image quality while keeping Frame Generation active. That was my choice with an RTX 4090 (more on the test here).

　　We knew that post-launch, Diablo IV would be updated with ray tracing. Today, NVIDIA revealed that reflections would become ray traced in a future patch. I'm not sure it's the best choice given the type of game (perhaps global illumination, ambient occlusion, and/or shadows may have been more impactful), but I'm curious to check the result. Neither NVIDIA nor Blizzard gave any indication of the estimated time of arrival for the ray tracing update.

　　If you don't own a GeForce RTX GPU, you can still activate NVIDIA Reflex to bring system latency down by up to 67%, according to NVIDIA.

　　The new Game Ready driver also fixes the following bugs, according to the official release notes:

　　Applying GeForce Experience Freestyle filters cause games to crashMonitor may briefly flicker on waking from display sleep if DSR/DLDSR is enabled.[SOLIDWORKS 2023] rendering issues when Enhanced Graphics Performance is enabled[MAGIX Vegas Pro] Preview not working properly on some notebooks[TouchDesigner] Degraded performance using Vulkan[Nsight Tools] Abnormal termination that previously required a reboot