Monday, January 9th 2023
NVIDIA Could Release AI-Optimized Drivers, Improving Overall Performance
NVIDIA is using artificial intelligence to design and develop parts of its chip designs, as we have seen in the past, making optimization much more efficient. However, today we have a new rumor that NVIDIA will use AI to optimize its driver performance to reach grounds that the human workforce can not. According to CapFrameX, NVIDIA is allegedly preparing special drivers with optimizations done by AI algorithms. As the source claims, the average improvement will yield a 10% performance increase with up to 30% in best-case scenarios. Presumably, AI can do optimization on two fronts: shader compiles / game optimization side or for power management, which includes clocks, voltages, and boost frequency curves.
It still needs to be made clear which aspect will company's AI optimize and work on; however, it can be a combination of two, given the expected drastic improvement in performance. Special tuning of code for more efficient execution and a better power/frequency curve will bring the efficiency level one notch above current releases. We have already seen AI solve these problems last year with the PrefixML model that compacted circuit design by 25%. We need to find out which cards NVIDIA plans to target, and we can only assume that the latest-generation GeForce RTX 40 series will be the goal if the project is made public in Q1 of this year.
Source:
CapFrameX
It still needs to be made clear which aspect will company's AI optimize and work on; however, it can be a combination of two, given the expected drastic improvement in performance. Special tuning of code for more efficient execution and a better power/frequency curve will bring the efficiency level one notch above current releases. We have already seen AI solve these problems last year with the PrefixML model that compacted circuit design by 25%. We need to find out which cards NVIDIA plans to target, and we can only assume that the latest-generation GeForce RTX 40 series will be the goal if the project is made public in Q1 of this year.
37 Comments on NVIDIA Could Release AI-Optimized Drivers, Improving Overall Performance
This can work in reverse, too: by observing what optimizations the AI comes up with, we can learn to pay attention to things we don't right now.
AI has been used by multiple chip designers for many years now, it's just they find new ways to apply it.
I'm totally OK with AI optimizing drivers as long as those optimizations are transparent, understood and approved by human beings.
The biggest issue with many AI models nowadays is that they produce basically black boxes where you don't quite understand what and how they do which has a non-zero chance of leading to disastrous results when the input data is outside the training set.
That doesn't sound like something Nvidia would want.
In my opinion, this wouldn't lead to major upgrade of performance in commonly tested games that already are pretty optimized. But that could allow to generate optimized drivers for way more games than there is currently and this is probably where the gain will be much bigger.
In the end, it's mostly always optimizing shaders for a specific architecture that do not change. It's a bit more precise than just generating code for a broad application.
Well, AI may decide that the ultimate performance can be obtained via removing all brakes on thermal and power and boosting clocks to the sky. Or that color is overrated and revet back to CGA color space.
I can see the memes already! Especially cool would be the Chernobyl-based ones. 'And that is how a 4090 explodes.' Or 'Why are we the only company that uses negative OC voltage offset, graphite moderated vapor coolers and AI drivers? Because it's cheaper!'
Driver optimizations aren't like technologies such as Frame Generation, etc.
It's really hard to "lock it" to a specific card generation.
But it will surely be custom tailored for them, so the gains on other generations will probably be lower, at least. Possibly much lower.
Usage of these tools can be a very positive things. But they're still tools that need to be handled with care.