NVIDIA Game Ready WHQL Drivers Promised For 12 Holiday Game Titles

By Nathan Kirsch

The November-December holiday gaming season begins this Friday with the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops III and after that comes a flood of highly anticipated game titles in the coming weeks. NVIDIA is proactively stepping up and committing to GeForce gamers that they will be delivering WHQL certified Game Ready driver support on or before launch day for the top titles this holiday season.

This news is being announced just days after AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition 15.11 drivers were announced and said to be replacing AMD Catalyst drivers after being around for 13 years. AMD announced a slew of changes and promises that new software was built from the ground up with new code and will be able to compete with NVIDIA GeForce drivers and even the GeForce Experience App. Unfortunately for AMD, they said that AMD Radeon Software Crimson drivers are still a number of weeks away and that means the fancy new drivers will be missing when the holiday games begin to launch on Friday. NVIDIA appears to be capitalizing on this botch today by releasing GeForce 358.85 WHQL certified drivers more than 36 hours before Call of Duty: Black Ops III debuts.

NVIDIA is also offering over $100,000 in prizes right now to those that are registered GeForce Experience users. This is the first time that NVIDIA is using the new registration system in the GeForce Experience that was announced in the middle October 2015. That means it is only be available to people who have signed up for GeForce Experience with an account tied to their e-mail address. NVIDIA will be giving elgible gamers a chance win copies of Assassins Creed Syndicate, Call of Duty Black Ops III, GeForce GTX 980 Ti graphics cards, GeForce GTX 960 graphics cards, GeForce GTX 950 graphics cards and the SHIELD Android TV box. NVIDIA will also be giving away a third game title, but can’t talk about that just yet.

The games that NVIDIA has committed Game Ready WHQL Driver support for include (but arent limited to):

  • Assassins Creed Syndicate (Launched on October 23rd, 2015)
  • Call of Duty: Black Ops III (Launching on November 6th, 2015)
  • Civilization Online
  • Fallout 4 (Launching on November 10th, 2015)
  • Just Cause 3 (Launching on December 1st, 2015)
  • Monster Hunter Online (Early access)
  • Overwatch
  • RollerCoaster Tycoon World (Launching on December 10th, 2015)
  • StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void (Launching on November 10th, 2015)
  • Star Wars: Battlefront (Launching on November 17th, 2015)
  • Tom Clancys Rainbow Six Siege (Launching on December 1st, 2015)
  • War Thunder (Early access)

So, there you have a dozen game titles that NVIDIA will be supporting straight away to ensure gamers with GeForce video cards that they’ll have the best possible experience when the games launch.

We introduced our Game Ready drivers program two years ago. Rather than release drivers according to arbitrary timetables, our timelines for drivers are in lockstep with major game releases. When a new game hits, we release a Game Ready driver for that title right before it launches.

Getting Game Ready requires careful coordination with developers and precise planning of internal resources. When a game goes gold, we ratchet up our work. Our driver team looks for every performance tweak and bug fix and works until the 11th hour to get them into our Game Ready driver. Then we double check our work by getting each Game Readydriver WHQL certification from Microsoft.

It will be interesting to see if NVIDIA keeps their promise and is able to nail this aggressive Game Ready driver launch schedule!