NVIDIA's New Driver Adds DLSS 4.5 to Phantom Blade Zero and Faster Shaders to COD MW4

NVIDIA shipped a new GeForce Game Ready Driver on October 20, bundling support for five of the biggest PC releases of the next ten days rather than a single launch title. Driver 621.01 WHQL adds DLSS 4.5 to Phantom Blade Zero ahead of its October 28 debut, brings Microsoft's shader-precompiling Advanced Shader Delivery system to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 and Gears of War: E-Day, and upgrades Cyberpunk 2077's upscaling to second-generation AI models the same week the game adds Dynamic Multi Frame Generation.

DLSS 4.5 lands on Phantom Blade Zero before launch

S-GAME's wuxia action game gets the full DLSS 4.5 suite with this driver: Dynamic Multi Frame Generation on GeForce RTX 50 Series cards, and DLSS Ray Reconstruction to clean up the path-traced lighting and reflections in its combat arenas. NVIDIA's own published PC requirements put path tracing at 4K and 60 frames per second on an RTX 5080, while 1080p ray tracing at 60 frames per second is reachable on an RTX 5060. Phantom Blade Zero releases on Steam and the Epic Games Store on October 28, with the driver support arriving a full week ahead of it so players can test their rigs before launch day.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 skips the shader wait

Modern Warfare 4's DMZ mode entered early access this week ahead of the game's full October 23 launch, and this driver is the one that ships with it. Alongside the usual DLSS Super Resolution and Frame Generation support, the headline addition is Advanced Shader Delivery, a Microsoft-built system that precompiles a game's shaders in the cloud and hands players a Precompiled Shader Database matched to their exact hardware and driver combination the moment they download the game through the Xbox PC app. That skips the local shader-compilation stutter that has plagued PC launches for years. Microsoft's DirectX developer blog says the delivery pipeline now covers hundreds of thousands of hardware and driver pairings with a near-100% cache hit rate, and Gears of War: E-Day picks up the same support in this release.

Cyberpunk 2077 moves to second-generation DLSS models

CD Projekt Red's game receives an October 22 update that swaps in second-generation AI models for Multi Frame Generation, Ray Reconstruction and Super Resolution, and adds DLSS 4.5 Dynamic Multi Frame Generation for GeForce RTX 50 Series owners. Dynamic mode automatically shifts between frame-generation multipliers rather than locking players to a fixed 2x, 3x or 4x setting, aiming to balance frame rate against input responsiveness and image quality on the fly.

Crimson Desert Enhanced joins the DLSS 4.5 wave

Pearl Abyss's open-world action game launches its Charting the Unknown content on October 29 with the complete DLSS 4.5 feature set built in from day one, putting it alongside Phantom Blade Zero as one of the first major releases to ship with Dynamic Multi Frame Generation rather than adding it after launch. NVIDIA also used the driver's release notes to note that its newer DLSS 5 neural rendering model, which debuted this year in NBA 2K27, is now ten times faster than the version NVIDIA first showed off in March.

Getting the driver

GeForce Game Ready Driver 621.01 WHQL is available now through the NVIDIA app and on NVIDIA's driver download page for GeForce RTX and GTX desktop and laptop GPUs. NVIDIA recommends enabling its Reflex latency-reduction feature alongside the new Call of Duty support on any GeForce RTX system, and its full release notes list the standard set of fixed and known issues alongside the new game support. Players chasing the Phantom Blade Zero and Crimson Desert Enhanced launches have a week to update and benchmark before either game arrives.

NVIDIA's extended gameplay trailer for Phantom Blade Zero, posted in August, showing the path-traced combat now covered by this driver's DLSS 4.5 support.