GeForce Game Ready Driver 556.12 is here, with the big update being day one support for The First Decendant – a new free-to-play four-player co-op action RPG shooter powered by Unreal Engine 5. The game is set to be a visual showpiece, including several real-time ray-traced lighting effects (ray-traced reflections, ray-traced ambient occlusion, and ray-traced shadows), DLSS 3.5 with Ray Reconstruction, NVIDIA Reflex, and NVIDIA DLAA support.
The First Descendant ‘RTX On’ gameplay trailer.
The latest GeForce Game Ready Driver also “gets your system ready” for PAYDAY 3’s upcoming DLSS 3 Frame Generation implementation as part of the new Boys in Blue update. Performance-wise, DLSS 3 will deliver 2X improvements when playing the game in 4K, with everything from the GeForce RTX 4070 and up hitting triple digits.
The latest driver also adds more Optimal Settings for games, automatically adjusting in-game visual settings to maximize performance and fidelity. It’s a part of the legacy GeForce Experience app and the new NVIDIA App, which is still in beta.
The four games are Bodycam, EA SPORTS F1 24, Pax Dei, and Soulmask. In addition to supporting The First Descendant and PAYDAY 3’s new update, GeForce Game Ready Driver 556.12 also fixes a few issues with Halo Infinite and The Last of Us Part I crashing and Valorant’s in-game stats showing high latency – issues caused by recent driver updates. So, even if you don’t plan on playing The First Descendant, it’s still worth updating.