We’re currently working on a review of MSI’s RTX 5070 Ti VENTUS PZ GPU and Rick put us on notice that the NVIDIA 591.44 driver kicked in some serious VTEC, yo, on Black Myth: Wukong. It seems possible that NVIDIA is correcting for a Windows 11 update that dropped last month where users were up in arms about significant performance drops across multiple games.
Of course, the Vole did not acknowledge such performance drops, but looking at NVIDIA’s release notes for 591.44, they make a general statement about a bug fixed on the topic of “Users running R580 branch drivers (58x.xx) or newer may observe lower performance in some games after updating to Windows 11 October 2025 KB5066835”.
MSI Ventus GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Graphics Card RTX 5070 Ti 16G VENTUS 3X PZ OC
Let’s take a look-see at the differences we observed between 581.80 and 591.44 for Black Myth: Wukong:
At 1440p with the Very High Preset and Upscaling set to Quality, we found the 581.80 driver to provide 57 FPS, upscaled to 86 FPS. After the driver upgrade, we saw 87 FPS (an improvement of 52.6%) and an upscaling improvement of 30.2%.
Kicking on Ray Tracing to Very High gave us an even larger boost – 591.44 increased performance by 88% over 581.80, and adding Ray Tracing to the mix, we saw a 58% boost.
These are quite significant gains – of course, we don’t have data for this card going back in time, but we do have others, such as the ASUS Prime GeForce 5070 Ti that we reviewed back in February. This was with driver version 572.43, but we saw performance closer to the 581.80 doldrums than what we’re currently seeing with today’s 591.44.
Bottom line here – if you’re playing Black Myth: Wukong on an NVIDIA card, run, don’t walk, to update your drivers and carry on.
Discussion (11 replies)
Join Discussion →Are these drivers decent enough for older rtx users to use now?
So far I've only heard good things about them but I couldn't really say in regard to an older card. The majority of the positive claims seem to involve newer 50 series which had its own share of bad drivers throughout the year.
I'm running 14 month old drivers on my 2060S, starting to get minor problems on some newer games. I should probably jump up to last year's Dec. drivers now at least. Getting tired of Dune Awakening telling me my drivers are out of date every launch and making click on an extra box to run the game.
I'd watch out for the early 2025 drivers. I got lucky and no problems for me but it seems like most folks were still having issues up until around August or so.
I will say that swapping out my EVGA 3080 12GB for a PNY 5080 was seamless. Nvidia had a driver update ready, so I did that after booting up, and off I went a testing.
Haven't had any issues so far to report either, other than that this card, at stock, is insanely quiet. Really couldn't expect more out of one of the cheapest 5080s available, and glad I got a chance to give PNY GPUs a look.
Yeah, I've had the drivers from Nov/Dec '24 downloaded for awhile in case I needed them. I've just been lazy since I've had no major problems. From all the bad reports I've had no desire to touch any drivers from Jan to July.
Also running a PNY 5080 that's been flawless. Super quiet, very powerful. And it's a stupidly good overclocker.
I understand this is reality, though i always question, why. I find it strange these performance hit or improvements with drivers, really, will it ever be consistent from go? Will things ever be implemented as they should from start. Such a weird reality to me anyway.
Yeah, I find it odd to. Too many factors to consider for sure to be certain why also. Yep, a weird reality to live in.
To be fair M$ has been dropping some epically bad Windows updates lately.
Gaming need more people like John Carmack who actually know what they are doing. Also ggetting enough time to actually finish and optimise a game would also help.