Quote from here https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comment ... iscussion/
------------------------------------------Driver performance testing
There is a lot to chew up here. The driver itself, when compared to the previous one on the same Windows platform (apples-to-apples so to speak), is not bad at all. Except for a slight loss on Wildlands lower Frame Times, the rest of the metrics are either stable or a bit better than with 446.14. No issues here. But still doesn't catch up with 442.59.
The big feature of this new driver is, of course, the support for WDDM 2.7 and the new Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS for short). This feature allows your graphics card to manage its own video memory (VRAM) instead of the operating system. This should improve latency and response times, but also frees up some CPU computing power, in exchange of a bit higher GPU usage. As such, results of this new feature are very CPU/GPU dependant, along with the tested game itself. On CPU limited configurations, and/or CPU hungry games like Wildlands or FC5 (usually DX11 games) the new feature may squeeze some extra performance from your computer. On Dx12/Vulkan games (which are usually much less CPU limited), the new feature seems not that useful.
Arkham Knigth is the black sheep here. Previous reports of HAGS disliking a lot PhysX games seem true, and nVidia driver team has not been able to fix that incompatibility. This game lose a huge chunk of performance with 451.48, and what is worse, it is choppy as hell with heavy stutters.
My recommendation:
If you haven't upgraded your Windows 10 yet to v2004, there are no performance reasons to upgrade. Unless you need some specific bug fixed, 442.59 is still performing a bit better.
If you already have the new Windows 10 v2004 May Update installed, then you should probably upgrade to the new driver (and remember to manually enable HAGS, as it's disabled by default). On DX11 games or if your PC have some CPU bottleneck issues this will probably increase the performance of your games, both in raw framerate and with less stuttering. On the other hand, DX12/Vulkan games won't probably see much improvement though (if any).
Just be aware that HAGS is a new feature, and as such is expected to still have some bugs. If you use this feature, remember to disable as much Gameworks/PhysX options as possible on any game that use them, like Arkham Knight.
X4 being a CPU centric game, and using Vulkan, should benefit.
To set HAGS in Win 10 2004 see screenshot .. https://i.imgur.com/0OzT1q7.png
The latest NVidia driver at time of writing v451.48 includes now the updated Vulkan 1.2
YMMV
Also note in the screenshot, if you browse and add game executables to the Graphics Performance list, you can then click them and set High Performance.
I believe this is supposed to be hooked into Windows Focus assist too, which will make windows cool its activities when playing a game.