Skip to main content

Get your rig ready for ‘Overwatch’ with new drivers from Nvidia

1158836 autosave v1 2 overwatch gall
Image used with permission by copyright holder
As of today, Blizzard has officially unleashed its new game Overwatch on a horde of fans eager to see whether it’s truly the next big thing in the online FPS genre. And to prepare for the occasion, Nvidia released new drivers intended to help players get the most out of the game.

Yesterday, the company released its newest GeForce Game Ready 368.22 WHQL drivers with special optimizations for use with the retail version of Overwatch. Players can expect better performance and specially tailored SLI profiles from the download, according to coverage from Tech Report.

Recommended Videos

Nvidia has also shared some information about the kind of performance players can expect from a few of its GPUs. These estimates are made based on the assumption that your rig uses an Intel Core i7-4790 processor, 8GB of RAM and the 64-bit version of Windows 10.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
Check your inbox!

With those specs, Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 980 Ti graphics card will accomplish a steady 60 FPS frame rate with graphics, when set to high, at a resolution of 3,840 x 2,160p. The GeForce GTX 970 will manage the same performance at a resolution of 2,560 x 1,440p.

Meanwhile, the more budget-friendly GeForce GTX 950 will maintain a stable 60 FPS at 1,920 x 1,080p with detail settings adjusted to medium. It seems that it won’t be too much of a hassle to get Overwatch to run well, which makes sense, given the intent behind the game.

Overwatch seems to be Blizzard’s attempt to tempt FPS fans with a perennial experience not unlike its card battler Hearthstone. While its core gameplay is an updated take on the class-based exploits of Team Fortress 2, elements like randomized loot drops are designed to snag players for the long haul.

Nvidia’s 368.22 GeForce drivers are available to download now direct from the source, or via the company’s GeForce Experience application. Overwatch is available now for PC, as well as Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

Brad Jones
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Brad is an English-born writer currently splitting his time between Edinburgh and Pennsylvania. You can find him on Twitter…
This new game will make your gaming PC sweat
black myth wukong benchmark

Black Myth: Wukong is coming out next week, but ahead of the game's release, developer Game Science has put out a dedicated benchmark tool. The free app, which is available on Steam now, will push even the best graphics cards to their limits, and I took it out for a quick spin to see how demanding the game really is.

The short answer is extremely demanding. As you can see from my initial run below, I was only able to achieve an average of 22 frames per second (fps) in the benchmark at 4K with maxed-out settings. That's with the most powerful gaming hardware available right now, pairing an RTX 4090 GPU with a Ryzen 7 7800X3D.

Read more
Nvidia reportedly caught scraping AI data from Netflix and YouTube (again)
Nvidia CEO Jensen in front of a background.

According to a damning report from 404 Media, backed with internal Slack chats, emails, and documents obtained by the outlet, Nvidia helped itself to "a human lifetime visual experience worth of training data per day," Ming-Yu Liu, vice president of Research at Nvidia and a Cosmos project leader, admitted in a May email.

Unnamed former Nvidia employees told 404 that they had been asked to scrape video content from Netflix, YouTube, and other online sources in order to obtain training data for use with the company's various AI products. Those include Nvidia’s Omniverse 3D world generator, self-driving car systems, and “digital human.”

Read more
Nvidia is taking generative AI into a whole new dimension
A visualization of Nvidia's Omniverse platform.

We've seen plenty of generative AI tools that can spit out images, from Microsoft Designer to Stable Diffusion, but Nvidia is taking generative AI into a new dimension -- literally. The company announced a partnership with Shutterstock at Siggraph 2024 that will allow users to generate 3D models using generative AI.

There are handful of AI tools that can generate 3D models, but Shutterstock's take is definitely the most official tool we've seen so far. The models will live in Shutterstock's TurboSquid library, which currently hosts the company's library of 3D assets. To generate new assets, Shutterstock says users will be able to provide text and images as prompts. From there, designers can take the assets and edit them in separate apps, with exports available "in a variety of popular file formats," according to Nvidia.

Read more