NVIDIA Releases Feature-packed GeForce 465 Series Drivers For Linux & Windows

It’s not often that NVIDIA releases both a Linux and Windows driver on the same day that bring their own notable changes, but the newly-released 465 versions do just that.

On the Windows side, the new 465.89 driver adds NVIDIA Reflex low-latency technology to Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege, with promises of input lag improvements of up to 30%. Considering just how popular this game is, and how crucial it is to have smooth gameplay, this could addition could be adopted pretty quickly. NVIDIA says that seven of the top 10 shooters on the market today now use Reflex.

Also new with this driver is optimization for the upcoming Outriders, which includes the addition of DLSS. This title doesn’t support ray tracing, but still looks really demanding on GPU hardware, so the help of DLSS is likely to be appreciated by any RTX gamer playing the game. In the video below, released in January, NVIDIA claims DLSS can nearly double your frame rate.

In addition to these two titles receiving some polish, this latest driver is also optimized for Dirt 5‘s new ray tracing feature, Evil Genius 2: World Domination, and Kingdom Hearts. Five new G-SYNC Compatible monitors have also been added to the support list: Asus XG16A, Dell S2522HG, LG 7GP850/27GP83B, LG 32GP850/32GP83B, and Xiaomi Mi 245 HF1.

The Windows driver has one last little surprise, and it’s one that ties in with the new feature added to the Linux driver: GPU virtualization. With the latest 465 series driver, users will be able to take advantage of their NVIDIA GPU inside of a virtualized host, meaning that if you’re willing to run a virtual machine, no Windows game should be off-limits.

There are some caveats here to be aware of, all laid out in this support article. In order to use a GPU inside of a VM guest, you will need to treat it as a secondary GPU in the host. That means you’ll either have to use Intel’s integrated graphics as your primary, or another NVIDIA discrete card. This isn’t ideal, but from a technical standpoint, it’s the easiest to implement.

The biggest limitations that exist with this new solution is that only one virtual machine can take advantage of the GPU acceleration at a time. If you want to up the supported number, you will need to opt for a workstation or enterprise GPU, revolving around Quadro and Tesla cards.

GPU passthrough is a feature we’ve been wanting for well over a decade, so we plan to test it out soon, and see how performance fares versus running a native Windows OS.

To grab either of these new drivers, you can head over to the official GeForce download page.