Nvidia rolled out its latest Game Ready drivers for GeForce graphics cards on Tuesday. We don’t normally cover the hot-and-heavy world of graphics drivers releases (just keep them updated, okay?), but this one features a notable milestone: Game Ready driver 451.48 is fully DirectX 12 Ultimate compliant, meaning Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 20-series graphics cards are the first hardware to support Microsoft’s next-gen graphics API.
While it’s notable, it’s no surprise. DirectX 12 Ultimate unifies graphics support across PCs and the forthcoming Xbox Series X, rolling in features like an updated version of Microsoft’s DXR ray tracing API, variable rate shading tier 2, mesh shaders, and sampler feedback. Most of those technologies appeared first in Nvidia’s “Turing� graphics cards—the RTX 20-series and GTX 16-series—but haven’t been seen often in games, as they’ve been limited to Nvidia hardware.