NVIDIA aligns their graphics driver releases with game launches, and today’s 398.36 is for Ubisoft’s The Crew 2. The game comes out on Friday, but the graphics vendors like to give a little room if possible (and a Friday makes that much easier than a Tuesday). NVIDIA is also running a bundle deal – you get The Crew 2 Standard Edition free when you purchase a qualifying GTX 1080, GTX 1080 Ti, GeForce gaming desktop, or GeForce gaming laptop. Personally, I would wait for new graphics cards to launch, but if you need one now then – hey – free game!

Now onto the driver itself.

GeForce 398.36 is actually from the 396.xx branch, which means that it’s functionally similar to the previous drivers. NVIDIA seems to release big changes with the start of an even-numbered branch, such as new API support, and then spend the rest of the release, and its odd-numbered successor, fixing bugs and adding game-specific optimizations. While this means that there shouldn’t be anything surprising, it also means that it should be stable and polished.

This brings us to the bug fixes.

If you were waiting for the blue-screen issue with Gears of War 4 to be fixed on Pascal GPUs, then grab your chainsaws it should be good to go. Likewise, if you had issues with G-SYNC causing stutter outside of G-SYNC games, such as the desktop, then that has apparently been fixed, too.

When you get around to it, the new driver is available on GeForce Experience and NVIDIA’s site.