NVIDIA today released the latest version of its GeForce Game Ready drivers. Version 551.76 WHQL comes with optimization for "The Thaumaturge." This includes support for Reflex, and DLSS 3 Frame Generation in the game. Among the gaming bugs fixed with this release include game stability issues seen in "The Talos Principle 2" with DLSS 3 Frame Generation enabled; and general bugs fixed include NVENC accelerated video encoding in GeForce GTX 16-series GPUs causing video corruption or error messages (this issue was expeditiously fixed in a recent Hotfix). Steam component Steamwebhelper.exe causing notebook display mode switching to block, has also been fixed.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 551.76 WHQL

NVIDIA released a Hotfix driver update to fix certain issues with the NVENC hardware encoder of GeForce GTX 16-series "Turing" GPUs, such as the popular GTX 1660, and GTX 1650 Ti, etc. Apparently, applications utilizing the hardware acceleration provided by the GPU's NVENC unit would result in corrupted videos or spring up error messages. The Hotfix driver is based on GeForce 551.68, and is not WHQL-certified. NVIDIA may include fixes contained in the hotfix in one of its upcoming GeForce Game Ready or Studio main trunk drivers. GeForce GTX 16-series "Turing" GPUs feature an NVENC unit that can accelerate H.264 and H.265 encoding.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 551.68 Hotfix for GTX 16-series NVENC Issues

With generative AI and hybrid work environments becoming the new standard, nearly every professional, whether a content creator, researcher or engineer, needs a powerful, AI-accelerated laptop to help users tackle their industry's toughest challenges - even on the go. The new NVIDIA RTX 500 and 1000 Ada Generation Laptop GPUs will be available in new, highly portable mobile workstations, expanding the NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture-based lineup, which includes the RTX 2000, 3000, 3500, 4000 and 5000 Ada Generation Laptop GPUs.

AI is rapidly being adopted to drive efficiencies across professional design and content creation workflows and everyday productivity applications, underscoring the importance of having powerful local AI acceleration and sufficient processing power in systems. The next generation of mobile workstations with Ada Generation GPUs, including the RTX 500 and 1000 GPUs, will include both a neural processing unit (NPU), a component of the CPU, and an NVIDIA RTX GPU, which includes Tensor Cores for AI processing. The NPU helps offload light AI tasks, while the GPU provides up to an additional 682 TOPS of AI performance for more demanding day-to-day AI workflows.

Twitch, OBS and NVIDIA are leveling up livestreaming technology with the new Twitch Enhanced Broadcasting beta, powered by GeForce RTX GPUs. Available in a few days, streamers will be able to stream multiple encodes concurrently, providing optimal viewing experiences for all viewers. Today, many streamers must choose between higher resolution and reliable streaming. High-quality video provides more enjoyable viewing experiences but causes streams to buffer for viewers with low bandwidth or older viewing devices. Streaming lower-bitrate video allows more people to watch the content seamlessly, but introduces artifacts.

Twitch—the interactive livestreaming platform—provides server-side transcoding for top-performing channels, meaning it will create different versions of the same stream for different bandwidth levels, improving the viewing experience. But the audience of many channels are left with a single stream option. Twitch, OBS and NVIDIA have collaborated on a new feature to address this—Twitch Enhanced Broadcasting, releasing in beta later this month. Using the high-quality dedicated encoder (NVENC) in modern GeForce RTX and GTX GPUs, streamers will be able to broadcast up to three resolutions simultaneously at up to 1080p.

As a leading brand in True Gaming hardware, MSI unveils the latest line-up of graphics cards featuring the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 GPU, with the GAMING and VENTUS 2X BLACK series, which are available starting on June 29th, 2023.

The latest MSI GeForce RTX 4060 series graphics cards are designed to deliver incredible performance for mainstream gamers and creators at 1080p resolution at high frame rates with ray tracing and DLSS 3. The GeForce RTX 4060 GPU product delivers all the advancements of the NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture—including DLSS 3 neural rendering, third-generation ray tracing technologies at high frame rates, and an eighth generation NVIDIA Encoder (NVENC) with AV1 encoding

ZOTAC Technology Limited, a leading global manufacturer of innovation, announces additional members to its next-generation graphics card line-up, built on the powerful NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture. The GeForce RTX 4060 8 GB series is designed to deliver incredible performance for mainstream gamers and creators at 1080p resolution with Ray Tracing and DLSS 3 at high frame rates. The GeForce RTX 4060 8 GB graphics card delivers all the advancements of the NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture—including DLSS 3 neural rendering, third-generation ray tracing technologies, and an eighth generation NVIDIA Encoder (NVENC) with AV1 encoding.

ZOTAC had announced the ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 4060 8 GB SOLO graphics card as a part of the initial lineup of the 4060 Family. Today, ZOTAC unveils two additional GeForce RTX 4060 8 GB models: the TWIN EDGE OC WHITE EDITION and the OC Spider-man: Across the Spider-Verse inspired bundle. The ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 4060 8 GB TWIN EDGE OC WHITE EDITION combines ZOTAC's signature aerodynamic-inspired design with minimalistic and clean style, while also featuring the highest clock speed out of ZOTAC GAMING's 4060 8 GB selection. This pure-white, dual-fan graphics card epitomizes form, utility and style, letting gamers add just the right touch of personality and beauty to their gaming builds.

We have updated our popular NVCleanstall software that lets you customize the NVIDIA GeForce Driver package by removing components you don't need or want. Unlike the NVIDIA custom installation, you can unselect packages like Stereo 3D Glasses, USB-C, Notebook Optimizations, or Telemetry from the NVIDIA drivers, allowing for a truly custom installation. In the latest release of NVCleanstall 1.16.0, the software has been patched with a few interesting additions. Firstly, the software can now disable NVIDIA's Ansel in-game screen capture from the driver package. Next, the software also added a new install action, "Copy Folder," which copies the NVCleanstall output directory to a folder of your choice.

Besides new features, some fixes have been implemented as well. The "auto-accept unsigned driver warning" only worked on Windows 11 and has been fixed now to work on Windows 10, too. A rare crash has been fixed on systems with English (United States) culture settings, but with the decimal separator switched to a value other than "."—"," for example. Due to a change in NVIDIA's drivers the NVENC patch integration stopped working recently, which is fixed with this release as well. The upgrade is recommended for all users.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp NVCleanstall 1.16.0

ASUS today announced NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 and 4060 Ti graphics cards for the ROG Strix, TUF Gaming and ASUS Dual families, delivering the latest NVIDIA architecture and cutting-edge tech such as DLSS 3 frame generation to mainstream gamers. The RTX 4060 Ti graphics cards will be the frontrunners for this series, and they will ship with a healthy 8 GB of VRAM. At a later date, ASUS will also launch variants of the ROG Strix, TUF Gaming, Dual, and Dual White RTX 4060 Ti graphics cards equipped with an even-larger 16 GB pool of VRAM. The extra helping of memory will give gamers with a taste for cutting-edge graphics extra headroom to dial up high-resolution textures and high-end visual effects in demanding games.

The ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4060, TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 4060, ASUS Dual GeForce RTX 4060 and ASUS Dual White GeForce RTX 4060 are also coming at a later date. ASUS will share all the details on these graphics cards soon, so gamers will not have to wait long to learn more about them—or make one their own. These GeForce RTX 4060 Ti and RTX 4060-powered GPUs are designed to deliver incredible performance for mainstream gamers and creators at 1080p resolution at 100 frames per second with ray tracing and DLSS 3. The GeForce RTX 4060 product family delivers all the advancements of the NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture—including DLSS 3 neural rendering, third-generation ray tracing technologies at high frame rates, and an eighth-generation NVIDIA Encoder (NVENC) with AV1 encoding.

GIGABYTE TECHNOLOGY Co. Ltd, a leading manufacturer of premium gaming hardware, today launches NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB, GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB and GeForce RTX 4060 8 GB series graphics cards powered by NVIDIA ADA Lovelace architecture. GIGABYTE offers a wide range of graphics cards, including the AORUS and GIGABYTE series, to cater to the diverse needs of gamers. These cards are designed to meet the demands of gamers seeking the ultimate in performance and stunning aesthetics, as well as those who prioritize fundamental performance and durability. These graphics cards will enhance the gaming experience for a vast number of gamers.

The GeForce RTX 4060 family is designed to deliver incredible performance for mainstream gamers and creators at 1080p resolution at 100 frames per second with Ray Tracing and DLSS 3. The GeForce RTX 4060 product family delivers all the advancements of the NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture—including DLSS 3 neural rendering, third-generation ray tracing technologies at high frame rates, and an eighth generation NVIDIA Encoder (NVENC) with AV1 encoding.

NVIDIA today released the latest version of its GeForce Game Ready drivers. Version 531.61 WHQL comes with support for the new GeForce RTX 4070 "Ada" graphics card that goes on sale from today. The drivers also introduce official support for RTX Video Super Resolution, the new CUDA 12.1 compute API. The drivers also increases the number of concurrent NVENC sessions from 3 to 5 on RTX 40-series GPUs. Among the issues fixed with this release are game stability issues with "Assassin's Creed Origins when using the older 531.18 drivers; random game crashes noticed on RTX 30-series GPUs in "The Last of Us: Part 1," and black screen/hang noticed in the shader compile screen of "Hogwarts Legacy."

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 531.61 WHQL

NVIDIA has quietly removed some video encoding limitations on its consumer GeForce graphics processing units (GPUs), allowing encoding of up to five simultaneous streams. Previously, NVIDIA's consumer GeForce GPUs were limited to three simultaneous NVENC encodes. The same limitation did not apply to professional GPUs.

According to NVIDIA's own Video Encode and Decode GPU Support Matrix document, the number of concurrent NVENC encodes on consumer GPUs have been increased from three to five. This includes certain GeForce GPUs based on Maxwell 2nd Gen, Pascal, Turing, Ampere, and Ada Lovelace GPU architectures. While the number of concurrent NVDEC decodes were never limited, there is a limitation on how many streams you can encode by certain GPU, depending on the resolution of the stream and the codec.

TechPowerUp today released the latest version of TechPowerUp NVCleanstall, a handy utility that lets you take greater control over your NVIDIA GeForce software installation. NVCleanstall lets you disable stuff you probably don't need, such as Telemetry, or legacy components, giving your PC a leaner set of system software from NVIDIA. Version 1.15.0 introduces several handy changes. To begin with, the title screen shows whether the currently installed driver is a Studio driver (optimized for creators). A crash during the background update check for new NVIDIA drivers has been fixed.

We've added two more installer tweaks with this release. The first one lets you disable Multiplane Overlay (MPO)—doing so is known to fix certain rare system stuttering issues. Another tweak lets you disable the NVENC concurrent session encoding limits, so you can encode more than two streams in parallel. This tweak uses keylase's patch scripts from GitHub. The "build package" option has been improved to ensure it runs well on systems with more than 20 CPU cores, and better error reporting has been added. Grab TechPowerUp NVCleanstall v1.15.0 from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp NVCleanstall 1.15.0

NVIDIA today released the latest version of its GeForce Game Ready drivers. Version 527.56 WHQL comes with optimization for Portal with RTX, a remaster of the cult classic with enhanced with NVIDIA RTX, which we took for a spin. Besides, the new drivers also add optimization for The Witcher 3 Wildhunt Enhanced Edition, which will debut later this month, and Jurassic World Evolution 2. Among the issues fixed with this release include flickering noticed when looking at the sky in Watch_Dogs 2, on machines powered by RTX 4090; games with DLSS 3 crashing when ending a recording using Shadowplay or OBS with NVENC; display corruption noticed in Minecraft Java Edition, hotplugging between HDMI and DP not working correctly on RTX 4090; and certain issues with Adobe Premiere with H.265 and HEVC content.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 527.56 WHQL

NVIDIA is ready to launch its RTX A6000 series "Ada" professional-visualization graphics cards. These cards are targeted at the same market demographic as the NVIDIA Quadro series of the old—serious 3D content creation. The RTX A6000 leads the pack, and is based on the 4 nm "AD102" silicon (the same one powering the GeForce RTX 4090). The A6000 is better endowed than the RTX 4090 at the silicon-level, although operating at lower GPU clock-speeds, for its tighter 300 W power-limit (compared to 450 W of the RTX 4090).

The A6000 "Ada" is endowed with 18,176 CUDA cores across 142 SM, compared to the 16,384 CUDA cores across 128 SM of the RTX 4090. It also gets a higher number of Tensor cores, at 568. The defining differentiator between the A6000 and RTX 4090 has to be memory, with the pro-vis card getting 48 GB of ECC GDDR6 memory across the chip's 384-bit memory bus, clocked at 20 Gbps (960 GB/s memory bandwidth); compared to the 24 GB of 21 Gbps GDDR6X (1008 GB/s) of the RTX 4090. Also, the card enables all three NVDEC and NVENC video hardware-accelerators physically present on the AD102, for six independent accelerated transcoding streams.

Popular video transcoding and playback software FFmpeg, in its latest update, received support for AV1 format hardware-accelerated encoding leveraging the NVENC AV1 hardware encoders on the latest NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40-series "Ada" GPUs. The author Timo Rothenpieler remarked that in his testing, the new NVENC AV1 encoder is outperforming the NVENC HEVC-based FFmpeg encoding by 75 to 100 percent, in terms of encoding speed, at comparable quality. When deployed at a data-center scale, or even a production studio-scale, accelerated AV1 encoding should have a tangible impact on costs, and not just because AV1 is a royalty-free format. NVENC AV1 encoding support was also recently added to OBS Studio, the popular free video streaming software.

Popular video streaming software suite OBS Studio, in its latest version 28.1 release, adds hardware-accelerated AV1 encoding support for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40-series "Ada" GPUs. This takes advantage of the updated NVENC hardware media encoders "Ada" comes with, which has fixed-function hardware to encode AV1 video, a royalty-free format that offers comparable quality and bitrates to HEVC. There are a handful limitations, besides the fact that this only works with the RTX 40-series. To begin with, only the NV12 (OBS default) and P010 color formats are supported. The "rescale" feature in advanced output modes, isn't supported for now. Grab OBS Studio from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: OBS Studio 28.1

The defining feature of DLSS 3 is AI frame-generation, the ability of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40-series "Ada" GPUs to predict the next frame to one that's rendered by the GPU, and generate the frame without any involvement of the graphics rendering pipeline. NVIDIA is taking this concept to video encoding, too, letting you increase the frame-rate of your videos through the "magic" of frame generation. NVIDIA Ada GPUs' Optical Flow Accelerator (NVOFA) component can apply the same Optical Flow logic for videos as it does for graphics rendering, predict the next frame, and increase frame-rate through AI generation of that frame. NVIDIA refers to this as Engine-assisted Frame-rate Up Conversion (FRUC).

There's more to FRUC than the "smooth motion" features your TV comes with; NVENC compares two real frames from a video, determines motion vectors, and sets up an optical flow stage, so the generated frames that are interpolated with real frames are accurate. NVIDIA will be releasing FRUC as a library, so it can be integrated with popular content-creation and media-consumption applications on NVIDIA Ada GPUs. It allows people with Ada to create higher frame-rate videos; as well as those with Ada GPUs to consume media at higher frame-rates.A video presentation by NVIDIA on the video encoding features of Ada follows.

NVIDIA today unveiled the GeForce RTX 40 Series of GPUs, designed to deliver revolutionary performance for gamers and creators, led by its new flagship, the RTX 4090 GPU, with up to 4x the performance of its predecessor. The world's first GPUs based on the new NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture, the RTX 40 Series delivers massive generational leaps in performance and efficiency, and represents a new era of real-time ray tracing and neural rendering, which uses AI to generate pixels.

"The age of RTX ray tracing and neural rendering is in full steam, and our new Ada Lovelace architecture takes it to the next level," said Jensen Huang, NVIDIA's founder and CEO, at the GeForce Beyond: Special Broadcast at GTC. "Ada provides a quantum leap for gamers and paves the way for creators of fully simulated worlds. With up to 4x the performance of the previous generation, Ada is setting a new standard for the industry," he said.

In January, we introduced the ROG Strix SCAR 2022, an ultra-powerful esports gaming machine designed to blow away any and all competition. But we couldn't leave well enough alone, so we decided to make it even better. We're proud to announce the ROG Strix SCAR 17 Special Edition, the ultimate laptop for competitive gaming.

For most gamers, the regular 2022 Strix SCAR is the perfect companion, since it's lighter and more affordable than the new Special Edition, while offering exceptional gaming performance. But for gamers who need the absolute best of the best, cutting-edge technology paired with a bold cyberpunk design, the Strix SCAR 17 SE has arrived.

Encoding video is one of the significant tasks that modern hardware performs. Today, we have some data of AMD and NVIDIA solutions for the problem that shows how good GPU hardware encoders are. Thanks to Chips and Cheese tech media, we have information about AMD's Video Core Next (VCN) encoder found in RDNA2 GPUs and NVIDIA's NVENC (short for NVIDIA Encoder). The site managed to benchmark AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 GPUs. The AMD card features VCN 3.0, while the NVIDIA Turing card features a 6th generation NVENC design. Team red is represented by the latest work, while there exists a 7th generation of NVENC. C&C tested this because it means all that the reviewer possesses.

The metric used for video encoding was Netflix's Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion (VMAF) metric composed by the media giant. In addition to hardware acceleration, the site also tested software acceleration done by libx264, a software library used for encoding video streams into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC compression format. The libx264 software acceleration was running on AMD Ryzen 9 3950X. Benchmark runs included streaming, recording, and transcoding in Overwatch and Elder Scrolls Online.Below, you can find benchmarks of streaming, recording, transcoding, and transcoding speed.

NVIDIA's tool to enhance both live streaming and video conferencing just got even better. The Broadcast app has transformed the homes, apartments and dorm rooms of millions of content creators, remote students and workers into home studios through the power of AI—all without the need to purchase specialized equipment. The latest upgrade, NVIDIA Broadcast version 1.3, is available to download today and further improves noise removal, adds more camera compatibility, and reduces the impact on overall system performance.

NVIDIA Broadcast's noise removal AI effect has been widely praised for its ability to remove background noise while keeping speech clear and crisp. The exception? When someone speaks with a lot of emotion—typically speaking loudly or at a higher pitch—and their speech is sometimes inadvertently removed. This rarely happens, but is typically at the peak moments of excitement during a livestream. The new update addresses this with dedicated training sound profiles to retain that speech while removing the unwanted background noise.

NVIDIA today released the latest version of GeForce Game Ready drivers. The drivers add optimization for "The Medium," including support for RTX raytracing and DLSS. The drivers also introduce support for the Mobile GeForce RTX 30-series "Ampere" graphics. Among the issues fixed with this release include game crashes and broken HUD with "X4: Foundations" on RTX 30-series GPUs; game crashes for games based on the RE2 game engine in DirectX 11 mode; "Error 707" application crash with DaVinci Resolve; an application freeze with MPE GPU acceleration in Adobe Premiere Pro; a problem with color distortion in Zoom meetings with NVENC enabled; random crashes with "Detroit: Become Human;" and stuttering/lagging with game launches in Steam VR. Grab the drivers from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 461.40 WHQL

NVIDIA Wednesday released a Hotfix update to its GeForce software. Version 461.33 Hotfix addresses a few glaring bugs with the software that need to be immediately put out than waiting for the next WHQL update to take shape. For starters, the update fixes an Adobe Premiere Pro crash observed when using Mercury Playback Engine with CUDA GPU acceleration.

An application hang with NVIDIA Broadcast camera filters seen after GeForce 461.09 drivers has been fixed. Certain stuttering and lagging issues observed with Steam VR have been fixed. Random crashes with "Detroit: Become Human" have been fixed. Incorrect colors on Zoom video calls when using NVENC have been fixed. "Assassin's Creed Valhalla" crashing after extended gameplay has been fixed. "X4: Foundations" game crashes on GeForce RTX 30-series GPUs, and a broken HUD in Vulkan API mode, has been fixed. Grab the drivers from the links below.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce Hotfix 461.33 Standard | NVIDIA GeForce Hotfix 461.33 DCH

Intel today launched its Iris Xe MAX discrete graphics processor for thin-and-light notebooks powered by 11th Gen Core "Tiger Lake" processors. Dell, Acer, and ASUS are launch partners, debuting the chip on their Inspiron 15 7000, Swift 3x, and VivoBook TP470, respectively. The Iris Xe MAX is based on the Xe LP graphics architecture, targeted at compact scale implementations of the Xe SIMD for mainstream consumer graphics. Its most interesting feature is Intel DeepLink, and a powerful media acceleration engine that includes hardware encode acceleration for popular video formats, including HEVC, which should make the Iris Xe MAX a formidable video content production solution on the move.

The Iris Xe MAX is a fully discrete GPU built on Intel's 10 nm SuperFin silicon fabrication process. It features an LPDDR4X dedicated memory interface with 4 GB of memory at 68 GB/s of bandwidth, and uses PCI-Express 4.0 x4 to talk to the processor, but those are just the physical layers. On top of these are what Intel calls Deep Link, an all encompassing hardware abstraction layer that not only enables explicit multi-GPU with the Xe LP iGPU of "Tiger Lake" processors, but also certain implicit multi-GPU functions such as fine-grained division of labor between the dGPU and iGPU to ensure that the right kind of workload is split between the two. Intel referred to this as GameDev Boost, and we detailed it in an older article.

NVIDIA has reportedly increased the concurrent sessions limit of its NVENC hardware video encoder on GeForce graphics cards to 3, up from 2. This means up to three different apps could use NVENC simultaneously, or an app (such as Premiere Pro) could use up to three sessions of NVENC for faster live previews during video editing. NVIDIA's Quadro family graphics cards can have practically unlimited NVENC concurrent sessions. The company recently updated the NVENC support matrix page showing a "Max # of concurrent sessions" increase from 2 to 3. The first screenshot below shows the updated page, and the second one shows a Web Archive snapshot from 2 weeks ago. NVIDIA last updated its GeForce drivers late May with 446.14 WHQL, so you might want to update your drivers.