Three PC games are launching his week, and NVIDIA is ready for all of them. The company released GeForce Game Ready Driver 596.49 WHQL, covering Forza Horizon 6, Directive 8020, and Subnautica 2 (hitting Steam Early Access on May 14). The driver is available through the NVIDIA App and the official GeForce.com download page, and is certified for 64-bit Windows 10 (22H2) and Windows 11 including the 25H2 update.
The headliner is Forza Horizon 6, which arrives in Premium Edition Early Access on May 15 before its global launch on May 19 via Steam, the Xbox App, and Game Pass. Playground Games is taking the Horizon Festival to Japan this time, and the PC version is not short on graphical firepower: 4K HDR, ultrawide support, uncapped frame rates, ray-traced reflections, and ray-traced global illumination are all on the table. RTX 50-series owners get full DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation, while RTX 40-series cards support DLSS Frame Generation, and all RTX GPUs get DLSS Super Resolution. For those wondering about AMD upscaling, Forza Horizon 6 also supports FSR 4 for RDNA 4 hardware and XeSS 2.1 for Intel Arc. NVIDIA claims RTX 50 Series cards can hit up to 337 FPS at 4K, 414 FPS at 1440p, and 493 FPS at 1080p with DLSS 4.5 Multi Frame Generation active, though those numbers obviously lean hard on AI frame generation rather than raw rasterization muscle.
Directive 8020, Supermassive Games’ new sci-fi horror entry in the Dark Pictures Anthology, is out today on PC and benefits from path tracing with DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction on RTX 50-series hardware. Early benchmarks from DSOGaming using an RTX 5090 at 4K show native rasterization landing around 83 FPS average, RT mode dropping to roughly 63 FPS with DLSS 4 Quality, and full path tracing pushing framerates into the 30s without frame generation. Flip on MFG x4 with path tracing enabled and you’re back around 120 FPS — which tells you everything you need to know about the current state of path tracing and why AI upscaling is no longer optional for this tier of visuals.
Subnautica 2 rounds out the trio, hitting Steam Early Access on May 14 with DLSS integration on board. The game supports RTX technologies and should be a more forgiving workload than Directive 8020, given that Unknown Worlds’ underwater survival games have historically prioritized playability over cutting-edge graphical demands.
Beyond the launch titles, the 596.49 release also fixes an enhanced smoothness issue that appeared with DLSS Frame Generation and V-Sync in previous driver versions. NVIDIA has removed GTX 10 Series and GTX 900 Series cards from Game Ready driver eligibility at this point; those older GPUs will still receive security updates but won’t see new GRDs going forward.