Nvidia Releases "Creator Ready" RTX Drivers

AlphaAtlas

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Earlier this week, Nvidia rolled out a set of "creator ready" drivers that are compatible with consumer GPUs, but optimized for professional applications. This level of support is typically reserved for drivers that only work with pricey Quadro GPUs, but Nvidia says they've conducted "exhaustive multi-app testing" in programs like Adobe Premiere and After Effects. Support for this driver goes all the way back to Pascal cards, and extends to Nvidia's more affordable offerings like the GTX 1050 and the more recent 1660.

Perhaps even more interestingly, Nvidia claims they've worked with a number of software vendors to leverage the raytracing and machine-learning muscle their RTX cards offer. Autodesk Arnold and Unreal Engine 4, for example, now support RTX accelerated rendering, and Redcine-X Pro seemingly uses Turing's updated video processing block to decode 8K video without taxing the CPU. Meanwhile, Lightroom uses "an extensively trained convolutional neural network to provide state-of-the-art image enhancing for RAW photographs." While I haven't tested Lightroom's new features myself, in my experience, neural networks can perform small miracles when processing images. Nvidia also claims the new driver features significant performance improvements in Photoshop, Premiere, Blender Cycles, and Cinema 4D.

"Creators are constantly faced with tight deadlines and depend on having the latest hardware and creative tools to complete their projects on time, without compromising quality," said Eric Bourque, senior software development manager at Autodesk. "We're excited that NVIDIA is introducing a Creator Ready Driver program because it will bring Arnold users an even higher level of support, helping them bring their creative visions to life faster and more efficiently." The first Creator Ready Driver is now available from NVIDIA.com or GeForce Experience. From GeForce Experience, you can switch between Game Ready and Creator Ready Drivers at any time by clicking the menu (three vertical dots in the top right corner). Creator Ready Drivers are supported for Turing-based GeForce RTX, GTX and TITAN GPUs, Volta-based TITAN V, Pascal-based GeForce GTX and TITAN GPUs, and all modern Quadro GPUs.
 
Thank you Radeon VII for forcing their hand.

Hopefully we as consumers can see the end of the "Workstation" cards sooner rather than later.
 
I think workstation cards should still exist and provide much higher performance for these types of tasks, but consumer cards with the same set of capabilities shouldn't be artificially hampered as part of marketing segmentation. Kudos to Nvidia for finally changing their stance on this.
 
What a break in tradition, especially for Nvidia. Are sales of RTX cards that slow, or have they had a sudden change of heart?
 
I think workstation cards should still exist and provide much higher performance for these types of tasks, but consumer cards with the same set of capabilities shouldn't be artificially hampered as part of marketing segmentation. Kudos to Nvidia for finally changing their stance on this.
Ja, Quadro still has the advantage when it comes to memory, bandwidth, and double precision when compared to GeForce. I/O is the primary bottleneck in enterprise and HPC applications.
 
It would be interesting to see if these drivers somehow degrade performance in regular games compared to the regular drivers, but I don't understand why it would.
 
What a break in tradition, especially for Nvidia. Are sales of RTX cards that slow, or have they had a sudden change of heart?


Change of heart? Hahaha thats a good one. I expect this is to prop up 2080ti sales at current price point by appealing to the lowest end pro line series buyers.

I remeber when you could flash bios and install quadro drivers to make any card a pro card. For both ati and nvidia.
 
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I've been doing ml since the 1060/1080/1080ti cards for the past few years. This announcement is nothing new to me as their drivers are very well suited to allow hw acceleration for ml projects. In fact, my applicaiton development is scaled to work from those aforementioned 1060 to 2080 to Tesla and Volta cards. Performance scales well and I've been able to use SLI to overcome some memory sizing issues.
 
Nvidia doesn't make this clear in the press release, but the "neural network" Lightroom RAW enhancer doesn't appear to have anything to do with RTX hardware. Adobe recommends a dedicated GPU for it but I didn't see anything about a specific GPU. They just say it requires WindowsML or CoreML (Windows/Mac OS respectively) so it should work on AMD/Intel graphics just as well. When Adobe announced the feature back in February they didn't say anything about Nvidia hardware.
 
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