NVIDIA Secretly Enables Bonus Undocumented Features with Latest Drivers

Ron Perillo / 7 years ago

The last words you want to hear on July 4th is probably “undocumented” but not in this case. It might also sound uncharacteristic from the green team, but it appears that NVIDIA quietly enabled two major features with their latest 384.76 WHQL drivers. This includes bringing DirectX12 to older-generation video cards as well as NetFlix 4K support without Intel Kaby Lake CPUs. These features are not in the documents with the latest drivers. Users simply made the discovery after installation. While the driver itself is not without faults (it crashes Watch Dogs 2 for example) these two undocumented features are a welcome addition.

NetFlix 4K Support Without Kaby Lake?

User Aethervisor noted on his Reddit post that he can finally watch 4K on the NetFlix Windows 10 app. He is using an Intel Core i7-6700K Skylake CPU with the latest Windows 10 Creators Update installed. The GPU is an NVIDIA GTX 1080. He initially noticed that the 4K Ultra HD tag on his NetFlix App is present after updating, and suggests that it was initially omitted for Oculus compatibility.

DirectX12 on Fermi Video Cards

With the 384.76 WHQL driver update also comes DirectX12 support. The feature update was spotted by Guru3D forum user maur0 who noticed his GTX 570 indicating Direct3D 12 under the DX diagnostic window. Following his post, forum member user1 posted a TimeSpy benchmark screenshot showing a verified 373 valid performance score. NVIDIA actually made a promise to deliver DirectX12 to all their hardware all the way back in 2014, but unfortunately only kept it for Kepler and Maxwell GPUs. Better late than never I guess.