Nvidia releases new Creator Ready Drivers boasting improved performance in Adobe desktop apps

Nvidia unveiled their new Creator Ready Drivers (CRD) for the Titan, RTX 20, GTX 10 and GTX 16 series graphics cards at GTC 2019 last week and now they’re ready to download.

Nvidia claims they offer increased performance while offering greater stability with the apps that many photographers, video editors and other creatives use on a daily basis. Applications like Adobe Photoshop CC and Premiere Pro CC, both of which, Nvidia says see up to a 9% performance increase.

The drivers are already available to download and install on my GTX 1050 powered laptops

Nvidia says that the Creator Ready Driver releases are “timed to key creative application updates, ensuring the best compatibility and performance for those who depend on PCs for their creative work”. The download page boasts up to 13% improved performance in Blender Cycles rendering engine, as well as up to 9% in Photoshop and Premiere Pro and 8% in Cinema 4D.

Supported products include…

NVIDIA TITAN Series:
NVIDIA TITAN RTX, NVIDIA TITAN V, NVIDIA TITAN Xp, NVIDIA TITAN X (Pascal)

GeForce RTX 20 Series:
GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, GeForce RTX 2080, GeForce RTX 2070, GeForce RTX 2060

GeForce 16 Series:
GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, GeForce GTX 1660

GeForce 10 Series:
GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, GeForce GTX 1080, GeForce GTX 1070 Ti, GeForce GTX 1070, GeForce GTX 1060, GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, GeForce GTX 1050

While they don’t give specific numbers for the others, they say it also provides an “optimal experience” for Autodesk Arnold, Unreal Engine 4.22, Redcine-X Pro, Adobe Lightroom (presumably they mean Classic CC) and Substance Designer (at least, since Adobe bought it).

From looking at this performance report from Puget Systems, though, it’s difficult to really corroborate the performance claims, as Nvidia hasn’t stated exactly what the software was doing in order to present these performance gains. Puget Systems tested the new 4.19.67 CRDs against four previous versions of the regular drivers, and the performance seemed mostly similar between all of them.

So we don’t know if these tests are based on the everyday operation of the software, or very specific tasks that just happened to perform particularly well with the new drivers. A lot of software, like Premiere Pro, is still primarily based on CPU performance, not the GPU, so it’s difficult to really know what methods they used.

According to PCGamesN, there isn’t that much performance difference between the new CRD vs the Game Ready Drivers (GRD), but that the CRD should offer more overall stability – a valuable feature to creatives who don’t want their graphics card & software to crash and reset in the middle of working.

That is not to say that there won’t ever be a big performance increase in creative applications, but right now there doesn’t seem to be a definitive way to test it against the GRD to back up Nvidia’s performance claims. As new software is released from Adobe and other companies, though, we might see them starting to run much more efficiently using the CRD vs the GRD.

But the release cycle for CRD is expected to be much slower than that of GRD where gaming performance is prized over stability. Although, many run GRD just fine for creative uses without any stability issues. If you’re one of those who doesn’t have any problem with the Game Ready Drivers, you might be better off sticking with them for now until we can see exactly where the CRD’s performance benefits lie. But if you do have stability issues, then you may likely be better off sacrificing a little short term performance vs the GRD to solve that particular problem.

I have two laptops here with Nvidia GTX 1050 GPUs, both running the Game Ready Drivers, and I’ve not experienced any issues with them yet. I have just switched one over to the Creative Ready Drivers, though, so let’s see how well it performs in the long term.

You can find out more about the Nvidia Creator Ready Drivers announcement here, see the complete 418 Creator Ready Driver v419.67 release notes here, and download them through the GeForce Experience desktop software or the Nvidia website.

Have you installed the Creative Ready Drivers yet? Have you noticed any performance or stability increases?

[via CNET]

Wojtek Królak

But does it work with Blender?
- Kaouthia
  
  As mentioned in the post…
  
  “The download page boasts up to 13% improved performance in Blender Cycles rendering engine”
  
  I would imagine it’ll also offer EEVEE some benefit, too, once 2.8 becomes official. :)
  - Wojtek Królak
    
    Oh, that’s great! Thank you! 😁
    - Gavin Haywood
      
      Also they are needed for the new D Noiser plug in. The plug in didn’t work for me until I downloaded these drivers. The benefits of now being able to use this plug in are great. I’m running 1060 on a laptop
Larry Templeton

Wow, it’s only taken them, what… fifteen years—that I’ve been aware of—to acknowledge that individuals (not corporations) who need a GPU for “creative applications” like photo and video editing actually use a “gaming” GPU. As of just recently, Nvidia wouldn’t acknowledge their gaming GPU’s could even be used for computational tasks related to video production. “I’m sorry, you’ll need to use our Quadro card,” which meant adding a zero to the price of your card (for roughly the same hardware, but more “professional” drivers).

And Adobe’s been selling nearly every new edition of Premiere with the line “It works so much better with your GPU now!” which usually boiled down to only a few effects that you wouldn’t dream of using, like the glitter transition—while anything with the words “noise” and “reduction” in it would treat your GPU like a centrifuge running Israeli malware.

But, even if Adobe still hasn’t figured out how to use a GPU to crunch numbers, and these “Drivers for Creatives” don’t amount to anything yet, it’s still a huge step for Nvidia to recognize reality. And maybe something meaningful at some point be achieved using “GPUs that are built for gamers (and crypto miners) only!”

(I have to say however, that Davinci Resolve seems able to utilize GPUs somehow, and well…)