Nvidia updates its graphics drivers on a somewhat regular basis, but they"re most often aimed at gamers with the "Game Ready" title usually attributed to them. Today, Nvidia has a release aimed at content creators, specifically those dealing with video and image editing workloads. The Creator Ready driver version 419.67 aims to bring performance improvements to a variety of content creation tools such as Adobe Photoshop and Premiere.
Specifically, Nvidia says this driver will provide "optimal experience" for Autodesk Arnold, Unreal Engine 4.22, REDCINE-X PRO, Adobe Lightroom, and Substance Designer by Adobe. It also includes performance improvements in other apps. Using the Nvidia RTX 2080 as an example, Nvidia says you"ll see up to 13% better performance in Blender cycles, up to 9% in both Adobe Photoshop and Premiere, and up to 8% performance improvements in CINEMA 4D.
This driver also introduces support for Surround on G-SYNC-Compatible displays with Turing GPUs, and it adds two new monitors to the list of G-SYNC-Compatible hardware, adding up to the full list found here:
- ASUS VG278QR
- ASUS VG258
For gaming, Nvidia did update a couple of 3D Vision profiles, for Devil May Cry 5 and Total War: Three Kingdoms, but that doesn"t mean things have improved much, with both still being rated at "Not Recommended". In fact, the latter title has seen its rating drop from version 419.35, where it was rated at "Fair".
This release does include a nice list of bug fixes, though, which will certainly be welcome for users. These include a fix for ShadowPlay recording where parts of the screen would be cut off, and one for multi-monitor setups with the RTX 2070 GPU. Here"s the full list:
- [DaVinci Resolve]: Performance drop occurs. [2532482]
- [Ghost Recon: Wildlands][Ansel]: The game experiences low performance and stuttering and then crashes when using Ansel. [2515076]
- [HDR][Far Cry:New Dawn DirectX 11]: Desktop brightness and color gets overexposed with ALT + TAB when Windows HDR is disabled and in-game HDR is enabled. [200495279]
- [Total War: Warhammer 2]: Poor performance when using antialiasing. [2506465]
- [Adobe]: Artifacts may appear in Adobe applications (fixed for single-GPU case). [2533911]
- [Apex Legends]: Screen gets corrupted when switching from windowed mode to full-screen mode when Windows HDR is enabled.[2523309]
- [GeForce Experience]: Parts of the screen are cut off when recording video with Shadowplay. [2517587]
- [Turing][Star Citizen]: The game flickers and then crashes to the desktop. [2518104]
- [GeForce GTX 980]: NVAPI calls take a large amount of CPU time. [2418933]
- [Titan RTX]: Graphics card rises about 20 degrees Celsius when running NVLINK command to enable TCC mode. [2504836]
- [GeForce RTX 2080][Notebook][Resolume Arena 6]: The game exhibits slow performance. [2511725]
- [GeForce RTX 2070]: With two monitors connected and active, the second monitor flickers. [2517103
Even with all those fixes, there are a handful of problems to be aware of. For example, Adobe applications may still have artifacts in SLI mode, though the issue isn"t present for single GPU configurations. Here"s the full list:
- [SLI][Adobe]: With SLI enabled, artifacts may appear in Adobe applications. [2533911]
- [SLI][HDR][Tom Clancy"s The division II]: The game screen becomes unresponsive or goes blank when in-game HDR options are toggled. [200496967]
- [ARK Survival]: Multiple errors and then blue-screen crash may occur when playing the game. [2453173]
- [Shadow of the Tomb Raider][Ansel]: Invoking Ansel in the game causes the game to slow down or crash. [2507125]
- [Ghost Recon Wildlands]: The game crashes when accessing the inventory menu. [2404783]
- Random desktop flicker occurs on some multi-display PCs [2453059]
Unlike previous versions of Nvidia"s drivers, the Creator Ready driver is only compatible with Windows 10 systems, and it can be downloaded from Nvidia"s website. The full release notes can be found here.
Desktop GPUs:
Download: Windows 10 - Standard / DCH
Notebook GPUs:
Download: Windows 10 - Standard / DCH
On a separate note, Nvidia announced earlier this week that ray tracing support is coming, in some form, to its GTX cards, specifically the GTX 1060 6GB and higher. It obviously won"t be quite as good as what"s offered by the RTX GPUs, but it will bring some of the benefits of ray tracing to more affordable hardware. The feature is scheduled to arrive sometime in April, though a more specific date wasn"t provided.