NVIDIA Releases Game Ready Driver and Recommends GPUs For Call of Duty: Black Ops III

By Nathan Kirsch

NVIDIA has released the ‘Game Ready’ driver for Call of Duty: Black Ops III, Anno 2205, and the new War Thunder patch with GameWorks! If you will be playing the Call of Duty: Black Ops III tonight at midnight you’ll want to make sure that your GeForce driven PC is using GeForce 358.87 WHQL drivers. The driver also includes an update to GameWorks VR along with updated SLI profiles for Act of Aggression, NBA 2K16, StarCraft 2, Sword Coast Legends, and Triad Wars.

Call of Duty: Black Ops III

Black Ops III looks like it’s going to be pretty tough on GPUs and NVIDIA recommends a GeForce GTX 970 graphics card for those running 1080P displays and want to get 60 FPS with high graphics quality settings. If you happen to be gaming on an Ultra HD 4K monitor you’ll need to step up to the GeForce GTX 980 Ti as the game title is really taxing on VRAM and appears to fill up the frame buffer quickly. The folks over at TPU have a screen shot showing that running Black Ops III at 2560×1600 with ultra settings is filling up the 6GB frame buffer on a GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB video card and is using all 12GB of system memory! Looks like Black Ops III really likes memory!

Black Ops III ram

If you haven’t seen the War Thunder NVIDIA GameWorks Trailer that is something work checking out. The game has received better water effects thanks to NVIDIA GameWorks and you can really see the difference in the tech demo trailer below. The latest game patch specifically added NVIDIA PhysX Destruction and WaveWorks. War Thunder is the first game to feature WaveWorks, which enables developers to deliver a realistic ocean simulation for their games. It also uses PhysX destruction to create fully destructible cities. In War Thunder, NVIDIA PhysX Destruction is running on CPU only, while WaveWorks is running on a game-specific CPU/GPU implementation. Both features will appear on PC and console versions as well as PCs with older GPUs. You can geek out on the Gameworks details with the War Thunder developers here if you’d like to know more.