When do the next generation GPUs drop?

EA does this a lot. The game will not run until you install the driver it wants. Rather dictatorial, but there you have it.

Yay! No wonder it took so long and a reboot to finish.

It also sounds like something that might have be worked around in the future when trying to play those games as very old legacy type games.

Quite possibly. Though I’m pretty sure EA gives not one damn about what might happen to our games down the road. Actually, I just play via their Origin Access thing, so technically I don’t actually own the game anyway…

Yeah they push the Origins thing pretty hard these days, but so do a lot of other publishers. The driver thing… except for annoyances with some customers and maybe a few videos complaining about performance on an drivers that are not optimized, this just doesn’t make sense, still doesn’t sense even with those instances.

Dunno; maybe they have a deal with NVIDIA or something? I guess that maybe they are trying to minimize one source of support complaints by forcing everyone on to the same driver version.

Betcha dollars to donuts it’s to minimize support costs and maximize user reviews. All these frostbite games are heavily optimized for by Nvidia.

If I were shipping a AAA game, I’d force a baseline driver as well. I’d do it to avoid a bunch of streamers and early players having performance problems, graphical glitches, or even crashes because they didn’t bother to update the driver as recommended. I’d want word of mouth to be as positive as possible right at launch (because lord knows there’s going to be other problems I didn’t anticipate).

Updating a driver is pretty easy these days. If you’re totally non-technical, then you have GeForce Experience installed and just do it as prompted anyway.

I did have a problem with a WHQL driver back when I was still on Windows XP, IIRC. As a matter of course I’m usually one or two versions behind, just to be safe (it helps that I’m almost never a Day One buyer).

Well AMD still exist, and their application won’t actually… work in that regard.

Those streamers like to brag about their rigs, last i checked, unless they have a beef, and some of them do, they like their performances clean and fast so they’ll update it without needing the push.

FWIW I run Radeon and the Adrenaline software has an auto-update function that works easy enough.

The Geforce Experience requires you to login to an Nvidia account to auto update I think? That irritated me enough I stopped doing regular updates.

Think you can just use Facebook or Google now as a login. Still annoying though.

So i guess Battlefield 5 doesn’t have RTX support yet, so still nothing playable?

Nope and no ETA for BF5.

https://www.dsogaming.com/news/battlefield-5-does-not-support-ray-tracing-rtx-effects-at-launch/

Patch 5 came out for Shadow of the Tomb Raider, also no RTX.

The RTX support for FFXV has been canceled. Ironically, as the FFXV benchmark program is the closest thing hardware sites have to a game to use for DLSS testing right now.

Is it true MS are struggling to get the Windows update out that would enable RTX support? I read that somewhere.

Yes, you need the increasingly poorly named 1809 update to get ray-tracing support in DirectX, but it was so buggy they pulled it when it released a month late in October and haven’t rereleased it since.

RTX != DXR. Microsoft controls DXR and probably tied to a DirectX/Windows update (thus delayed) but no games that I know of have even pledged support for it. DXR is cross platform and theoretically AMD compatible too.

There’s nothing in a windows update that’s blocking RTX. That’s all Nvidia and/or game devs.

That’s what the rumors have been saying, anyway. They took raytracing out of BF5 due to the delayed windows update.