NVIDIA Driver 616.56 Boosts RTX 5080 by Up to 21% in Compute, Improves Path Tracing

NVIDIA has released a certified driver package, GeForce Game Ready 616.56 WHQL. In initial independent benchmarks, the flagship GeForce RTX 5080 showed a sharp performance jump: up to +21.7% in OpenCL workloads and +8.1% in path tracing, though gains in traditional games were notably more modest.

Compute Leap and Path Tracing Test

According to Wccftech, the testing was conducted by independent developer Oswaldo Pinali Döderlein on a system with an AMD Ryzen 9 9900X processor. The new release delivered the biggest gains in graphics rendering and compute workloads:

• Geekbench 7 (OpenCL): up +21.7%;
• 3DMark DirectX Raytracing (Path Tracing): frame rate rose from 90 to 98 FPS (+8.1%);
• Cinebench R26 (GPU): up +6.7%;
• Blender 5.2.0: render time reduced by +6.1%;
• Geekbench 7 (CUDA): up +5.5%.

In synthetic gaming tests without heavy ray tracing, the difference was moderate: in 3DMark Speedway the card gained 1.8%, and in the Steel Nomad Vulkan test about 2.5%.

Architectural Upgrade: New Clang Compiler and NVVM 7.0

Such a significant compute boost is explained by a fundamental overhaul of the software stack. According to the official release notes for 616.56, NVIDIA has for the first time dropped the outdated OpenCL JIT compiler based on Clang 3.4, making the Clang + NVVM 7.0 combination the default standard.

Key low-level changes include:

• integration of the CUDA 13.4 library set;
• native hardware support for 16-bit floating-point (FP16) compute in OpenCL;
• expanded math libraries optimized for the Blackwell architecture;
• improved interoperability between OpenCL and Vulkan pipelines.

Real-World Gaming Frame Rates

In regular gaming titles, the update provides only a cosmetic boost. In Horizon Forbidden West, average frame rate increased by roughly 2% (both at native 4K and with upscaling), and in Dying Light 2 by 2.5%.

So installing the update hoping for a big FPS jump in regular games is pointless: 616.56 is optimized primarily for professional rendering, complex path-traced scenes, and scientific computing.

New Game Support and Bug Fixes

As reported in NVIDIA’s official announcement, the driver is optimized for the releases of STAR WARS Zero Company (with support for DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution and Multi Frame Generation), Hell Let Loose: Vietnam, and Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy.

Additionally, the developers fixed a number of annoying system bugs:

• V-Sync limit failure when using 3x or higher frame generation in DOOM: The Dark Ages and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle;
• artifacts and texture flickering in The Outer Worlds;
• incorrect detection of the Claude Desktop app as a heavy 3D game;
• crashes of the Chief Architect utility on RTX 40-series graphics cards.