Nvidia Game Ready Driver adds ReBAR support to 'Horizon Forbidden West' and game support for recent additions to 'Modern Warfare 3'

Aaron Klotz
·3 min read
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III / Warzone.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III / Warzone.

 

Nvidia has published a new driver ( 552.12) that adds game-ready support for Season 3 of Call of Duty Modern Warfare III and Warzone, the game’s free-to-play battle-royal component. The only other addition to Nvidia’s new driver is a new Resizable Bar profile for Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition, which enables ReBAR support in the game — giving GeForce gamers a slight performance improvement.

Season 3 is the latest update for Modern Warfare III and its battle-royal Warzone component. Warzone is getting new features, including the return to Rebirth Island, which debuted when Warzone first launched several years ago. The map has been updated to modern standards, with all-new gameplay features that change the dynamics of the fan-favorite map.

Modern Warfare III Multiplayer also got a few updates for Season 3, including new maps and modes that will spice up the combat compared to prior seasons. Apparently, a massive in-season Zombies update is also coming that features a brand new Dar Aether Rift and a showdown with the Dark Aether entity face-to-face.

Nvidia shared performance analytics of most of its desktop and mobile GPUs, running the game with both DLSS 3 on and off. At 4K Ultra, Nvidia’s benchmarks report that the RTX 4090 gets 235.9 FPS average(166.6 with DLSS off), and the RTX 4080 Super gets 184.3 FPS average (120.9 with DLSS off).

At 1440P, the RTX 4090 gets 315.1 FPS average (201.6 with DLSS off), RTX 4080 Super 255.1 FPS (186.7 DLSS off), RTX 4070 Super 216.9 FPS (158.4 DLSS off), and the RTX 4070 gets 194.8 FPS average (138.8 DLSS off).

Nvidia only tested the RTX 4060 Ti and RTX 4060 at 1080p, but at that resolution both GPUs get well over 150 FPS. According to Nvidia’s results, the RTX 4060 Ti archives 205.3 FPS average (145.1 DLSS off) and the RTX 4060 178.2 FPS average (120.2 DLSS off). For the rest of the benchmark results, including the mobile RTX 40 series results, check out Nvidia’s full blog post on the new driver update.

The two-trillion-dollar GPU manufacturer also published latency results, to promote its Reflex latency-killing technology. Nvidia’s testing methodology does not say if DLSS 3 frame generation was used, but it's quite obvious that frame gen was disabled, due to the very fast results. Nvidia’s testing reveals that the RTX 4090 achieves 9ms of latency, the RTX 4080 Super has 10ms of latency, the RTX 4070 Super sits at 11ms of latency, the RTX 4070 has 12ms of latency, the RTX 4060 Ti sits at 15ms of latency, and the RTX 4060 achieves 18ms of latency with Reflex enabled. Testing was done on a Core i9-12900K test rig at 1080p.

Horizon Forbidden West Changes and Bugs

The only other change with this driver that Nvidia provided is a new Resizable Bar profile for Horizon Forbidden West. Sadly Nvidia did not reveal how much additional performance ReBAR adds. However, in my own (limited) testing with the previous Nvidia driver 551.76 and Nvidia Inspector to manually enable ReBAR in the game, I found that my RTX 4070 machine gained up to 8% more performance, but that was only in the most intensive parts of the game.

We should expect Nvidia’s ReBAR update to provide a similar performance improvement, if not more, since Nvidia can manually tweak the ReBAR size to the game’s specific needs. Manually enabling ReBar with Inspector doesn’t allow you to do this.

Nvidia also confirmed that there is an issue with Reflex in Horizon Forbidden West , where GPU utilization can be lower than normal when setting Reflex to “On + Boost”. This is something I've also run into while playing the game with my RTX 4070. The easiest workaround is to just switch Reflex to “on” mode, without boost, or use Nvidia Ultra Low Latency setting instead of Reflex.