Crank up Doom's framerate on GeForce cards with Nvidia's new WHQL drivers

By Kevin Parrish Published May 13, 2016

With id Software’s latest Doom installment now available in stores, it’s no surprise that Nvidia is serving up new GeForce Game Ready WHQL drivers that are optimized for the freshly-baked shooter. They arrive as version 365.19, and are also optimized for Homefront: The Revolution, and Master of Orion. The drivers can be obtained through Nvidia’s GeForce Experience client under the “Drivers” tab.

The new drivers add and update a number of SLI profiles including Battleborn, Dead Island, Dead Island: Riptide, Master of Orion, Battlefleet Gothic Armada, Obscuritas, The Moonlight Blade, and a few others. Homefront: The Revolution has a 3D Vision profile, but Nvidia has a “not recommended” label slapped next to it.

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Nvidia fixed a number of Windows 10 issues with the release of this driver set too. One issue involving Talos Principle caused the game to crash when SLI was enabled. Another issue was resolved that caused Tom Clancy’s The Division to stutter after 20 to 30 minutes when SLI was enabled. There was even an issue related to hot attaching and detaching the DisplayPort cable.

The new drivers also resolve an issue relating to the Oculus Rift, as previously the blacks appeared bright gray when the headset was set to”TV Levels.” The VulkanRT-Installer apparently caused false positives in virus scanning, but that is no longer a problem. Nvidia resolved a problem with the GeForce GT 720 where user couldn’t change the refresh rate in a specific multi-display configuration through the Nvidia Control Panel.

Windows 8.1 customers and older also see a few fixes thanks to the new driver release. The Vulkan version of Talos Principle received performance optimizations, and the crashes stemming from multiple renderer threads executed by the Vulkan driver in Unreal Engine 4 is fixed. On Windows 7 64-bit, the drivers clear up the garbage 3DMark 11 users were viewing.

However, with the new drivers comes a list of known issues. In Windows 10, there’s a performance drop in Street Fighter V when 4K and SLI is enabled. Star Wars: The Old Republic – Knights of the Fallen Empire will hang when in-game graphics settings are changed in full-screen mode. Users may also see a blank screen when disabling SLI while two screens are connected. The list goes on, and expands to separate Windows 8.1, Windows 8, and Windows 7/Vista groups.

As for how the new drivers run id Software’s just-released Doom (2016) on the PC, the company said that they provide the best possible framerates and frametimes whether gamers are playing the single-player campaign or duking it out online. Support for the Vulkan graphics API will be released in the near future, cranking up the framerates even more.

Of course, don’t expect miracles if you’re running the game on outdated hardware. At a minimum, Doom requires a Nvidia GeForce GTX 670 graphics card with 2GB of VRAM (Radeon HD 7870 2GB if you’re on Team AMD), an Intel Core i5-2400 or AMD FX-8320 processor, 8GB of memory, 55GB of storage space, and 64-bit versions of Windows 7, Windows 8.1, or Windows 10. Don’t even think about running this game on integrated graphics.

Naturally, you can get the new drivers two ways: through the GeForce Experience client, or by visiting Nvidia’s drivers section here. If you’re having issues with the new drivers, let Nvidia know by posting your troubles on the Feedback Forum.

Former Contributor

Kevin started taking PCs apart in the 90s when Quake was on the way and his PC lacked the required components. Since then…

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