NVIDIA Releases 352.86 Game Ready WHQL Drivers For The Witcher 3

With the highly anticipated The Witcher 3 being released today, NVIDIA has pushed out their requisite launch day Game Ready driver for the game with the release of driver version 352.86.

As is typical for a Game Ready driver, the focus on this driver is enabling SLI and GeForce Experience support for The Witcher 3, which along with its high profile nature is also one of the games in NVIDIA’s latest game bundle. Along with The Witcher, this driver also includes profile updates and bug fixes for a handful of other games, including Civilization: Beyond Earth and Magicka 2.

Perhaps more interesting is the fact that this marks the first Windows 7/8 (WDDM 1.x) release of a R352 branch driver. NVIDIA’s previous release for Grand Theft Auto V was from the R349 branch, and in fact this new branch comes barely a month after the introduction of the R349 branch. Unfortunately at this time beyond the handful of bug fixes and new profiles we don’t know whether R352 includes any major updates, as NVIDIA’s release notes don’t mention much else for this release. New branches typically contain more significant feature and performance enhancements, so there may be a surprise or two in here. At any rate what we do know is that NVIDIA has yet to merge their Win7/8 and Win10 drivers at this time, so this release only contains support for Microsoft’s current OSes, while the in-development Windows 10 continues to receive its own driver updates.

As usual, you can grab the drivers for all current desktop and mobile NVIDIA GPUs over at NVIDIA’s driver download page.

Newegg Launches Official & Unofficial AMD Radeon R9 Game Bundles

Kudos to the PC Perspective crew for tracking this one down. It looks like Newegg is running a very unusual set of video game bundles with AMD’s higher-end Radeon cards.

Having apparently launched in parts over the last couple of weeks, Newegg is now bundling multiple video games with many of the Radeon R9 cards the e-tailer carries. A “base” offer involves the recently launched DIRT Rally, Codemasters’ latest off-road rally driving game, which is being offered with most of the R9 cards. Meanwhile the also recently launched Grand Theft Auto V is also being offered as a bundled game in a more limited fashion, being included with many of the R9 290 and 290X cards.

What makes this bundle so unusual however is its simultaneous official and unofficial nature. Officially AMD is running a DIRT Rally bundle – though having never released an announcement about it – and according to the terms & conditions this bundle has been going on as recently as April 27^th, DIRT Rally’s launch day. Meanwhile Grand Theft Auto just recently begun showing up at Newegg, and unlike the DIRT bundle, AMD is disavowing all knowledge of this, stating that they are not involved in the GTA bundle.

As a result the cards covered by these various bundles are a bit more inconsistent than in official AMD bundles. 7 of the 9 R9 290 cards include DIRT, and only 5 of those 7 include GTA V. For the R9 290X, 15 of the 17 cards include DIRT, and 10 of those 17 cards include GTA V. Consequently while we typically always say to double-check cards for bundles before purchasing, this time we really mean it, as more cards than usual are being excluded.

Overall, although retailer-specific offers are not unprecedented, these days it’s very rare to have retailers run their own video game bundle promotions. Typically such promotions are backed by the manufacturer, if only to take advantage of the buying power of such a large order. So for Newegg to offer their own GTA V bundle is quite a surprise, and if it were not for the fact that Newegg is the only retailer doing this it would be hard to believe, especially given the high-profile nature of GTA V. Meanwhile the availability of the DIRT bundle is similarly odd; along with Newegg it’s available at NCIX, but surprisingly not Amazon or Best Buy. For the moment at least, it looks like it’s just Newegg that gets all the goods.

In any case, given the unofficial nature of these bundles, there isn’t a published end date for either bundle. The AMD DIRT Rally codes are valid until the end of 2015, however we would expect the promotion to end much sooner than that. Consequently very little of this makes any sense, but for prospective Radeon R9 buyers, enjoy it while it lasts.

Update – 5/15/2015: Well that didn’t last for very long. As of this morning all of the GTA V bundles are gone, and now only a handful of cards quality for the DIRT bundle; 2 of the R9 290s and 5 of the R9 290Xs. The entire situation gets curiouser and curiouser, and for the time being it looks like the bundles have tapered off almost as quickly as they appeared.

NVIDIA’s GRID Game Streaming Service Rolls Out 1080p60 Support

Word comes from NVIDIA this afternoon that they are rolling out a beta update to their GRID game streaming service. Starting today, the service is adding 1080p60 streaming to its existing 720p60 streaming option, with the option initially going out to members of the SHIELD HUB beta group.

Today’s announcement from NVIDIA comes as the company is ramping up for the launch of the SHIELD Android TV and its accompanying commercial GRID service. The new SHIELD console is scheduled to ship this month, meanwhile the commercialization of the GRID service is expected to take place in June, with the current free GRID service for existing SHIELD portable/tablet users listed as running through June 30^th. Given NVIDIA’s ambitions to begin charging for the service, it was only a matter of time until the company began offering the service, especially as the SHIELD Android TV will be hooked up to much larger screens where the limits of 720p would be more easily noticed.

In any case, from a technical perspective NVIDIA has long had the tools necessary to support 1080p streaming – NVIDIA’s video cards already support 1080p60 streaming to SHIELD devices via GameStream – so the big news here is that NVIDIA has finally flipped the switch with their servers and clients. Though given the fact that 1080p is 2.25x as many pixels as 720p, I’m curious whether part of this process has involved NVIDIA adding some faster GRID K520 cards (GK104) to their server clusters, as the lower-end GRID K340 cards (GK107) don’t offer quite the throughput or VRAM one traditionally needs for 1080p at 60fps.

But the truly difficult part of this rollout is on the bandwidth side. With SHIELD 720p streaming already requiring 5-10Mbps of bandwidth and NVIDIA opting for quality over efficiency on the 1080p service, the client bandwidth requirements for the 1080p service are enormous. 1080p GRID will require a 30Mbps connection, with NVIDIA recommending users have a 50Mbps connection to keep from any other network devices compromising the game stream. To put this in perspective, no video streaming service hits 30Mbps, and in fact Blu-Ray itself tops out at 48Mbps for audio + video. NVIDIA in turn needs to run at a fairly high bitrate to make up for the fact that they have to all of this encoding in real-time with low latency (as opposed to highly optimized offline encoding), hence the significant bandwidth requirement. Meanwhile 50Mbps+ service in North America is still fairly rare – these requirements all but limit it to cable and fiber customers – so at least for now only a limited number of people will have the means to take advantage of the higher resolution.

As for the games that support 1080p streaming, most, but not all GRID games support it at this time. NVIDIA’s announcement says that 35 games support 1080p, with this being out of a library of more than 50 games. Meanwhile I’m curious just what kind of graphics settings NVIDIA is using for some of these games. With NVIDIA’s top GRID card being the equivalent of an underclocked GTX 680, older games shouldn’t be an issue, but more cutting edge games almost certainly require tradeoffs to maintain framerates near 60fps. So I don’t imagine NVIDIA is able to run every last game with all of their settings turned up to maximum.

Finally, NVIDIA’s press release also notes that the company has brought additional datacenters online, again presumably in anticipation of the commercial service launch. A Southwest US datacenter is now available, and a datacenter in Central Europe is said to be available later this month. This brings NVIDIA’s total datacenter count up to six: USA Northwest, USA Southwest, USA East Coast, Northern Europe, Central Europe, and Asia Pacific.