Nvidia has released the GeForce Game Ready Driver 572.42 WHQL. The new software delivers day-one support for Avowed (Feb 18), Sid Meier's Civilization VII, an Indiana Jones and the Great Circle DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation (MFG) update, and the Wuthering Waves DLSS Frame Generation (FG) update. It also claims to fix some gaming bugs and irons out annoying wrinkles.
For lucky GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 owners, this is the first WHQL update since the launch driver, building on a Hotfix released on February 11. However, we have confirmation that the RTX 5070 Ti will be available from February 20, so relaxed Nvidians might want to wait a week. Another new driver will inevitably land on that day—unless the games mentioned above are in their libraries.
The first game-ready driver supporting the new RTX 5090(D) and RTX 5080 graphics cards came out at the end of January (572.16 - WHQL). It was an important release as it debuted DLSS 4 technology for titles like Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake 2, Hogwarts Legacy, Star Wars Outlaws, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
Feb 11's Hotfix stopped Valorant crashing on startup, which afflicted those with shiny new Blackwell GPUs and patched up a bug that caused Final Fantasy XVI to freeze on exit.
Today, we welcome the 572.42 WHQL driver and it WHQL-izes what the hotfix offered, and adds a game fix for Delta Force players. Some team-based shooter players were getting slower performance when Resizable BAR was enabled, which was an obvious error.
Another fix in the newest driver affects the 3DMark DXR Feature Test. It is peculiar, as the release notes say user tests resulted in an "Unusually low score for Blackwell GPUs." If that fixes everything, then the software developer time spent here hardly seems worthwhile.
The new 572.42 WHQL driver could also be a welcome download for the owners of several new monitors added to the G-Sync Compatible tier. Four AOC and one new Philips model can now benefit from a baseline Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) experience on supported Nvidia GPUs.
Looking at the big picture, the launch of the Blackwell architecture GPUs hasn't been smooth sailing for anyone involved. Thanks to our old friends (under)supply and demand, we've had availability and pricing issues. Now, a frightening number of users seem to be experiencing the second great wave of melting power connectors. While we wait for the worrying hardware and perhaps some firmware issues to be fixed on the newest GeForce family, the game optimizations and bug fixes in software offer little consolation.
