NVIDIA is very engaged when it comes to coordinating driver releases with upcoming games. Their last GeForce 347.88 WHQL driver was not only there to support the company’s Titan X launch, but to also, support the Battlefield Hardline players, during the roll-out of that title. Unfortunately, despite the testing and Q and A that goes into any driver release, some players started experiencing a less than optimal performance. In particular, players of both Battlefield Hardline and Dragon Age: Inquisition were met with crashes and other less than desirable gaming behavior.
In order to address this behaviour, NVIDIA has rolled out a set of hotfix drivers, that should bring relief to gamers that have been experiencing a less than optimum experience. In particular, the driver addresses Battlefield Hardline crashes resulting in DirectX error messages, and TDR (Timeout Detection and Recovery) crashes in Dragon Age: Inquisition.
While there may be other optimizations, these were the only things specifically noted in the release. Both 64-bit and 32-bit versions of the GeForce 350.05 drivers for all supported OSes, for both desktop and notebooks, are available here.
Speaking of other optimizations, it appears NVIDIA has also added support for OpenCL 1.2. While this really isn’t a gaming related addition to their “game ready” drivers, this does make it interesting for content creators, and users of software that does support it. We’re big fans of Adobe Creative Cloud, so we’ll take whatever optimizations we can get, gaming or not.