Editor’s note: This blog has been changed from the original to update the name from “Creator Ready Driver” to “NVIDIA Studio Driver.”

NVIDIA RTX GPUs have given video editors, 3D animators, game broadcasters, graphic designers and photographers around the world a major boost in productivity with hardware-accelerated ray tracing, AI-enhanced creative workflows and advanced video processing.

But as demands increase on creators to generate higher volume of quality content, it’s more important than ever to ensure the apps and hardware that creators depend on never miss a beat. So NVIDIA has introduced a Studio Driver program to provide artists, creators and game developers the best performance and reliability when working with creative applications.

To achieve the highest level of reliability, Studio Drivers undergo extensive testing against multiple revisions of the top creative applications. Whether you just updated to the latest release of your favorite creative app or are still on the prior version, Studio Drivers are fully tested.

We also conduct exhaustive multi-app testing for each type of creative workflow, evaluating driver quality in the same manner that creators work day-to-day. Cutting 4K video in Adobe Premiere Pro CC then moving it to After Effects CC for post-production then back to Premiere to render — an example of a video editor’s everyday workflow — is rigorously tested to ensure the best experience possible.

Learn more about our design and visualization initiatives to help creators, download the latest Studio Drivers, and provide us your feedback on the new program on the NVIDIA forums.

Studio 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.

We’ll continue to release Game Ready Drivers when the latest PC games and downloadable content launch — this remains unchanged. Both Game Ready Drivers and Studio Drivers will include the full NVIDIA feature set and application support for games and creative apps, so users can continue to use either driver they prefer. But creators now have an option to receive designated driver releases with more in-depth testing to meet the stringent demands of their work.

“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 Studio 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 Studio Driver is now available from NVIDIA.com or GeForce Experience. From GeForce Experience, you can switch between Game Ready and Studio Drivers at any time by clicking the menu (three vertical dots in the top right corner). Studio 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.

RTX Accelerates Creativity

The first Studio Driver release (version 419.67) comes optimized for all the top creative applications, including a number of exciting apps that have been accelerated for NVIDIA RTX GPUs.

Autodesk Arnold

Along with Autodesk, we’re announcing the public beta of RTX-acceleration in the Arnold renderer for Maya and 3DS Max.

Arnold’s GPU acceleration improves artists’ day-to- day workflows, providing fast interactive feedback during look development and lighting, and shortened final render times. Interactive rendering is unbelievably quick with ray tracing accelerated by Turing’s RT Cores and GPU-accelerated AI denoising. This means less time waiting and more time being creative, iterating and trying new ideas. Creators can access the Arnold public beta from www.arnoldrenderer.com.

And with thin and light Max-Q notebooks using GeForce RTX GPUs, the acceleration is also felt on laptops. This unchains artists from their desktops and lets them create whenever and wherever inspiration strikes.

Unreal Engine 4

Epic has been working to integrate RTX-accelerated ray tracing into their popular Unreal Engine 4, which is used by game developers and content creators to build amazing games and art.

Unreal Engine 4.22 with ray tracing support is available in preview now and will be available within two weeks.

“We’re excited to see NVIDIA deliver dedicated drivers with in-depth testing of Unreal Editor workflows. We recommend Studio Drivers for developers using Unreal Engine 4,” said Nick Penwarden, director of engineering for Unreal Engine at Epic Games.

REDCINE-X PRO

In addition to real-time rendering, RTX GPUs can significantly improve video editing workflows, opening the ability to decode and edit without needing to pre-render proxies. This means videographers can review and edit footage onsite, wherever that site may be.

At CES 2019, NVIDIA showed 6K 30 FPS REDCODE RAW video decoding and debayering on a GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q laptop. With the latest REDCINE-X PRO public beta available now, we’re showing at GTC 2019 how video editors can decode and debayer up to 8K 24 FPS 12:1 from these same laptops! This was a capability that, up until now, pushed the limits of even high-end dual-Xeon workstations.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC

Adobe recently released Enhance Details for Lightroom CC, a feature that uses machine learning and AI — an extensively trained convolutional neural network — to provide state-of-the-art image enhancing for RAW photographs. For this AI processing, Adobe recommends using a high-performance GPU. With NVIDIA RTX GPUs, photographers will be able to enhance their photographs up to 4x faster compared to integrated graphics.

Substance Designer by Adobe

Substance Designer is a tool for making materials and textures for 3D models. It features bakers to help artists create realistic environments. Substance Designer has recently added DirectX Ray Tracing support for light baking, allowing artists to render materials that used to take up to 14 minutes now in only 16 seconds using NVIDIA RTX GPUs. It’s a game-changing speedup for artists.

Learn more about other RTX-accelerated apps in the works.

In addition to support for RTX-accelerated apps, the new Studio Driver program brings performance improvements over Driver Release 415 for top creative applications:

Results are based on our test system using Windows 10 (RS4), Intel Xeon Gold 6154 CPU (3GHz), 64GB DDR4 memory, and GeForce RTX 2080 with driver branches R415 and R418.

Learn more about our design and visualization initiatives to help creators, download the latest Studio Drivers, and provide us your feedback on the new program on the NVIDIA forums.