NVIDIA GeForce 621.01 Driver: Phantom Blade Zero, CoD MW4 Shader Delivery and 7 Bug Fixes

NVIDIA has released GeForce Game Ready 621.01 WHQL for Windows 10 64-bit and Windows 11. NVIDIA’s GeForce News post went up on October 20, and the driver download page lists the release date as Wednesday, October 21. The download is about 1.04 GB, through the NVIDIA app or GeForce.com.

Games it’s ready for

The release notes list Phantom Blade Zero, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, NBA 2K27, Cyberpunk 2077 and Crimson Desert Enhanced: Charting the Unknown.

• Phantom Blade Zero (Oct 28): S-GAME’s wuxia action game uses DLSS 4.5 with Dynamic Multi Frame Generation on RTX cards, and DLSS Ray Reconstruction cleans up its path-traced lighting.
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 (full launch Oct 23): DLSS Super Resolution on all RTX cards, Frame Generation on RTX 40 Series, and Dynamic Multi Frame Generation up to 6X on RTX 50 Series, plus NVIDIA Reflex. The driver also enables Advanced Shader Delivery for every RTX owner.
• Cyberpunk 2077 (Oct 22 update): the game’s whole DLSS suite moves to DLSS 4.5 and gains Dynamic Multi Frame Generation, with Multi Frame Generation, Ray Reconstruction and Super Resolution switching to NVIDIA’s second-generation AI models.
• NBA 2K27 Season 2: a new DLSS 5 model that NVIDIA says lifts frame rates by up to 1.4X on RTX 50 Series GPUs, RTX Spark laptops and GeForce NOW, and that it calls 10X faster overall than the model that debuted in March.
• Crimson Desert Enhanced: Charting the Unknown (Oct 29): listed with “a full suite of DLSS 4.5 technologies.”

Advanced Shader Delivery, briefly

Advanced Shader Delivery is Microsoft’s system for precompiling shaders in the cloud. Developers using DirectX 12, Windows 11 and the Agility SDK capture their shaders, Microsoft’s servers compile them for many hardware and driver combinations, and the Xbox PC app ships the matching precompiled database with the game download. NVIDIA says that skips the shader-compile screen and, with a “near-100% cache hit rate,” avoids mid-game compile stutter. NVIDIA names Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 and Gears of War: E-Day, and says the benefit applies to supported games bought from the Microsoft Store.

Fixed bugs

From NVIDIA’s release notes:

• Wuthering Waves: possible crash when NVIDIA Freestyle filters are used with DLSS Frame Generation on.
• Star Citizen: a crash that could happen on the Vulkan API.
• Surviving Mars: Relaunched: possible crash after updating to R595 drivers.
• QHD monitors at 360 Hz: occasional black flashes in games.
• 360 Hz G-SYNC Pulsar monitors: frame rate could drop to 320 FPS.
• Meta Horizon Link: the stream could freeze over USB.
• Some ASUS notebooks: intermittent dimming after updating to R620 drivers.

Laptop owners should note NVIDIA’s usual line that notebook makers provide certified drivers for their own machines, so it’s worth checking your OEM’s page too.

Sources: NVIDIA GeForce News, NVIDIA driver 621.01 details.