According to the release notes provided by Nvidia, the Geforce 397.31 Game Ready WHQL driver brings optimizations for BattleTech and Frostpunk games, adds a couple of new features, namely the recently unveiled RTX ray tracing technology support for DirectX 12, full support for Vulkan 1.1 API, new driver libraries, and more.

It also adds or updates SLI profiles for Descenders, Frostpunk, Warhammer: Vermintide 2, and Far Cry 5 as well as fixes some bugs including issues seen with Doom on GTX 1080 Ti when HDR is enabled, crashes and flickering issues with GTX 1060 in Far Cry 5 and Rise of Tomb Raider games, issues with Diablo III and SLI and some other issues with NvfbcPluginWindow and Firefox.

Unfortunately, it appears that the new Geforce 397.31 Game Ready WHQL driver has some problems, mostly on systems with GTX 1060 6GB graphics card running on Windows 10 64-bit. There is a rather large thread on Geforce Forums concerning this issue so those running this configuration might want to hold on for an official hotfix driver. Nvidia's Software QA, Manuel Guzman, seems to think that the Code 43 error upon installing the Geforce 397.31 driver "mostly/only affects cards from PNY, Palit, and Gainward".

You can find the new Geforce 397.31 Game Ready WHQL driver over at Nvidia's support page.