NVIDIA launched Game Ready Driver 616.56 on August 26, 2026, delivering significant performance gains for the RTX 5080. The update notably boosted the GPU to 98 FPS in the 3DMark DirectX Raytracing path-tracing test, up from nearly 90 FPS with previous software.
The new driver provides an 8.1% improvement in path-tracing benchmarks and a massive 21.7% jump in OpenCL performance via Geekbench 7. Other gains include a 5.5% rise in CUDA tasks, a 6.1% boost in Blender 5.2.0, and a 6.7% increase for Cinebench R26 workloads.
While gaming titles like Horizon Forbidden West and Dying Light 2 saw modest gains of up to 2.5%, ray-traced gaming performance remained largely unchanged. The update brings OpenCL performance to within 30% of CUDA, optimizing the RTX 5080 for creative apps.