If you were lucky enough to score an RTX 3080, here's a packed new GPU driver for it

Yesterday's retail launch of the GeForce RTX 3080 was a bit of a whirlwind experience, and if you managed to scoop up one via preorder before the scalpers hogged them all, you can ready your PC for its arrival by installing Nvidia's new GPU driver. And if you were not one of the lucky ones, you still might want to install it.

First and foremost, Nvidia's 456.38 WHQL driver adds support for the RTX 3080, along with the RTX 3090 that will go on sale next week (September 24).

The driver also adds support for Fortnite's new RTX capabilities, including real-time ray tracing, DLSS, and Reflex, the latter of which is a recent addition to RTX designed to monitor and reduce latency. There's a custom RTX map in Fortnite's creative mode as well.

In addition, the latest driver adds day-one optimizations for Halo 3: ODST and Mafia: The Definitive Edition.

There are some new GeForce Experience features, too. Specifically, the new driver adds a 'One-Click Performance Tuning' option that "scans your GPU's performance characteristics and automatically overclocks it," to improve performance in games. This will also perform regular scans on your GPU. The only caveat is that it takes some time, initially—around 20-30 minutes, during which time Nvidia recommends letting your system run idle.

In-game performance monitoring is new as well. This is essentially an overlay that displays various stats, like CPU and GPU utilization, a framerate counter, and render latency.

This driver also enables capturing HDR broadcasts through ShadowPlay on GTX 900 series and above (the RTX 3090 can capture 8K 30fps with HDR enabled), it adds AI-powered noise removable and virtual background support to the Broadcast app, and expands the G-Sync Compatible program to five additional monitors (Acer XV253Q GW, Asus VG27AQ1A, LG 27GN800 and 27GN600, and ViewSnoic XG270Q).

There is an extensive list of fixed issues as well. They include:

• [Batman Arkham Knight]: Enabling Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling on PhysX games results in lower frame rate.
• [Call of Duty: Modern Warfare]: The game may intermittently see a drop in frame rate when ray tracing is enabled.
• [Detroit: Become Human]: The game may crash.
• [Forza Horizon 4]: Stuttering occurs in the game after racing a few laps.
• [Horizon Zero Dawn The Complete Edition]: Flickering and texture corruption occurs in game after setting Anisotropic Filtering to 16x from the Nvidia Control Panel.
• [madVR][MPC-HC]: Various HDR issues occur when using the madVR renderer with MPC-HC.
• [Minecraft Java Edition;]: The game may crash when launched with XSplit Broadcaster running in the background.
• [World of Warcraft]: Objects randomly flicker.
• Video playback on the secondary display lags/freezes while playing a game on the primary display if Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling is enabled.
• [Notebook]: Display is not detected when connected to Thunderbolt 3 port on HP Spectre x360 - 15t-df100 Notebook.
• [Notebook][Nvidia Control Panel]: With Clone mode set, only the Developer pages are visible in the Nvidia Control Panel after hot-plugging a DisplayPort/HDMI Freesync display.
• [Notebook]: When a game is played on the primary display and a YouTube video is played on the extended display, video playback is sluggish and stutters.
• [Pascal GPU][Marvel's Avengers]: The game may crash when switching windows [Alt+Tab] while the game is running.

This is one of the more expansive driver releases from Nvidia in quite some time. You can grab it through GeForce Experience, or head to Nvidia's driver download page to install it manually.