Nvidia supercharges RTX 40 cards with two performance-boosting features

You should generally keep your graphics card updated with its newest drivers, if not bleeding-edge options like beta and preview releases. But that’s especially true today if you happen to be using an RTX 40-series card from Nvidia. The newest 581.08 release from August 19th enables the interesting Nvidia Smooth Motion feature along with global DLSS overrides for the first time on these cards.

Smooth Motion was previously reserved for the newest RTX 50-series cards, though game developers got a preview of the feature going back to the RTX 40-series in July. Smooth Motion allows you to use frame generation tech in games that don’t support the newest versions of DLSS. Nvidia and some others have called this “doubling your frame rate” and similar thanks to the RTX 40-series single-frame generation capabilities, but that seems a bit vainglorious to me.

I wouldn’t go so far as to shout “fake frames,” but this is force-enabling frame generation with a little extra work. Like AMD’s similar Fluid Motion, it probably won’t be quite as smooth as it is on games that support the feature natively. To enable Smooth Motion on games that don’t support DLSS 3 frame generation, you’ll need the latest version of the official Nvidia App (which replaced Nvidia’s GeForce Experience) so you can enable it manually in a game profile.

RTX 40-series card and laptop owners also get global DLSS overrides. This allows you to manually add frame generation to games that can handle DLSS but don’t natively support frame generation. It’s a niche application of the tech, but probably welcome for that sliver of games released after DLSS but before frame generation became standard.

You can download the latest stable Nvidia drivers for your desktop or laptop right here. The usual gamut of bug fixes and individual game optimizations are included with this one, notably a path tracing crashing issue for Cyberpunk 2077‘s popular Photo Mode.