NVIDIA GeForce 456.38 WHQL Released: Ampere Support, SLI Finally Dead

[btarunr]

NVIDIA today released the latest version of GeForce Game Ready software. Version 456.38 WHQL comes with support for the new GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 "Ampere" graphics cards. The mammoth software release also adds optimization for "Fortnite" with RTX and DLSS on all GeForce RTX GPUs. The new NVIDIA Reflex technology is formally launched, with support for "Fortnite" and "Valorant." Reflex is supported on all NVIDIA GPUs going back to the GTX 900 series "Maxwell." Optimizations are also added for "Halo 3: OSDT" and "Mafia: Definitive Edition." Also introduced are the NVIDIA Broadcast app, and a host of new GeForce Experience features, including in-game performance/overlay, one-click performance tuning, HDR ShadowPlay Capture, AV1 decoding, support for new G-SYNC compatible displays.

Buried in the bowels of the driver change-log is a big disclosure, that the RTX 30-series "Ampere" GPUs don't support SLI (as in implicit multi-GPU), only explicit multi-GPU through modern APIs such as DirectX 12 and Vulkan (if supported by the game). NVIDIA has already restricted the NVLink interface needed for SLI only to its topmost RTX 3090 SKU, so the lack of implicit multi-GPU effectively marks the end of SLI for future GPUs. That said, the technology itself is very much present on all GPUs that support it, provided games do. NVIDIA announced the GeForce RTX 30 series "Watch Dogs: Legion" + GeForce NOW bundle. Buying a new GeForce RTX 30-series graphics card now comes with a year's membership of the GeForce NOW cloud gaming service, plus you get the next chapter in the Watch Dogs franchise, which supports a ton of NVIDIA RTX features, possibly including DLSS 8K.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 456.38 Game Ready Drivers



The change-log follows.

Game Ready

• Fortnite RTX: This new Game Ready Driver provides support for Fortnite's dramatic new update which adds raytraced effects, NVIDIA DLSS, NVIDIA Reflex, and a custom RTX map.
• Halo 3: ODST: Mafia: The Definitive Edition.

Gaming Technology

• Includes support for GeForce RTX 3080 and 3090 GPUs
• GeForce Experience Automatic Performance Tuning for GeForce RTX 30-series and RTX 20-series
• GeForce Experience in-game performance monitoring for GeForce GTX 600 series and above
• ShadowPlay gameplay recording now supports HDR on GTX 900-series and above (RTX 3090 can capture 8K 30fps HDR)
• NVIDIA Broadcast app with AI-powered noise removal and virtual background
• 5 New G-SYNC Compatible Monitors

New Features
Supports CUDA 11.1

SLI Profiles

• Baldur's Gate 3
• Comanche (NVIDIA Turing GPUs and later)
• Crusader Kings III
• Disintegration (NVIDIA Turing GPUs and later)
• Population Zero
• RIDE 4 (NVIDIA Turing GPUs and later)
• Rocket Arena (NVIDIA Turing GPUs and later)
• The Blackout Club (NVIDIA Turing GPUs and later)

SLI

• Implicit SLI Disabled on NVIDIA Ampere GPUs
• Implicit SLI, where the driver makes assumptions with application profiles to achieve GPU scaling, is disabled on NVIDIA Ampere GPUs. Explicit SLI is still supported, where the application knows the SLI state and uses extensions (such as DirectX 12 linked nodes, Vulkan device groups, or OpenGL multicast extensions) to issue commands to each device in the SLI group.

Fixed Issues

• [Batman Arkham Knight]: Enabling Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling on PhysX games results in lower frame rate.[2988376]
• [Call of Duty: Modern Warfare]: The game may intermittently see a drop in frame rate when ray tracing is enabled. [3050468]
• [Detroit: Become Human]: The game may crash. [3037846]
• [Forza Horizon 4]: Stuttering occurs in the game after racing a few laps. [3101001]
• [Horizon Zero Dawn The Complete Edition]: Flickering and texture corruption occurs in game after setting Anisotropic Filtering to 16x from the NVIDIA Control Panel. [200638389]
• [madVR][MPC-HC]: Various HDR issues occur when using the madVR renderer with MPC-HC. [3038381]
• [Minecraft Java Edition;]: The game may crash when launched with XSplit Broadcaster running in the background. [3052464]
• [World of Warcraft]: Objects randomly flicker. [3101638]
• Video playback on the secondary display lags/freezes while playing a game on the primary display if Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling is enabled [200586262]
• [Notebook]: Display is not detected when connected to Thunderbolt 3 port on HP Spectre x360-15t-df100 Notebook. [3087076]
• [Notebook][NVIDIA Control Panel]: With Clone mode set, only the Developer pages are visible in the NVIDIA Control Panel after hot-plugging a DisplayPort/HDMI Freesync display. [200637570]
• [Notebook]: When a game is played on the primary display and a YouTube video is played on the extended display, viudeo playback is sluggish and stutters. [200586262]
• [Pascal GPU][Marvel's Avengers]: The game may crash when switching windows [Alt+Tab] while the game is running. [3101682]

Windows 7 Issues

• [Notebook][H-Clone]: With the integrated graphics processor as the clone source, display settings cannot be changed from the NVIDIA Control Panel. [200594188]

Windows 10 Issues

• [SLI][G-SYNC][Red Dead Redemption 2 Vulkan]: With SLI + G-SYNC enabled, the games display corruption and a blank screen.[200645671]
• [World of Warcraft Shadowlands]: When run at frame rates greater than 60 FPS with high display settings, moving characters display minute twitching/stuttering. [200647563]
• [Sunset Overdrive]: The game may display random green corruption if Depth of Field is enabled from in-game settings. [2750770]
• [V]}: HDCP errors occur with Valve Index VR. [2967616]
• [Call of Duty - Warzone]: Freestyle does not work. (200593020)
• [Forza Motorsport 7]: The curb may display a black strip during a race on certain tracks. [2781776]
• [Fortnite]: Blue-screen crash occurs pointing to nvlddmkm.sys when playing the game at 4K resolution. [200645328]
• To work around, set the resolution to lower than 4k.
• [Zombie Army: Dead War 4][Ansel/Freestyle]: The Ansel & Freestyle tabs are unselectable. [2810884]
• You may encounter issues installing the NVIDIA Control Panel from the Windows Store.
• [Omniverse 2020.2.4496]: Corruption occurs after switching from RTX Real-Time to RTX Path-Traced renderer. [200649160]
• [Notebook][H-Clone]: With the integrated graphics processor as the clone source, display settings cannot be changed from the NVIDIA Control Panel. [200594188]
• [Notebook]: Some Pascal-based notebooks w/ high refresh rate displays may randomly drop to 60Hz during gameplay. [3009452]
• [Notebook]: Performance Power Mode cannot be set from the NVIDIA Control Panel. [200657525]

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[ebivan]

Cool, a driver for all the 200 people who managed to get one!

 

[ZoneDymo]

Cool, a driver for all the 200 people who managed to get one!

Well those are hte people Big N cares about the most, those that just loyally buy buy buy, spend spend spend

 

[skydoy]

Yeah it´s the only problem is the BOSD

Clean install incoming

 

[toilet pepper]

I cant find any link for the Nvidia Boradcast app.

 

[Assimilator]

Thank god they finally killed SLI officially.

 

[Krzych]

I don't get it. I understand that SLI is not going to be supported in future games, nobody expects that at this point, but to disable all support for existing ones?

 

[Assimilator]

I don't get it. I understand that SLI is not going to be supported in future games, nobody expects that at this point, but to disable all support for existing ones?

Please read the actual release notes before making ignorant comments.

 

[birdie]

I'm curious.

I guess pretty soon advances in fabrication will turn miniscule if not cease completely because you can only reduce transistors so much.

When that happens, it will be impossible to create larger and larger dies because it would require wafers of impossible sizes. Also, the video card itself only allows certain die dimensions.

The only way forward would be to stack GPU "cores" like CPU cores in which case it will become impossible to share the computational workload as it's currently done which means an alternative to SLI would be required.

How will NVIDIA/AMD/Intel/Apple/Qualcomm/Samsung/ARM/MediaTek/etc. approach this conundrum? Or will all game engines implement DirectX12/Vulkan multi-GPU scaling? Last time I heard it's extremely difficult to implement and only relatively large game development studios can afford it.

 

[moproblems99]

Well those are hte people Big N cares about the most, those that just loyally buy buy buy, spend spend spend

I would have bought one because AMD has been dragging their ass to release something that gives decent frame rates above 1440p.

 

[Krzych]

Please read the actual release notes before making ignorant comments.

It clearly says all implicit SLI is disabled, cannot see your problem here?

 

[Jism]

It clearly says all implicit SLI is disabled, cannot see your problem here?

For ampere GPU's. Not the previous series.

 

[Sp33d Junki3]

It clearly says all implicit SLI is disabled, cannot see your problem here?

Read again.
the RTX 30-series "Ampere" GPUs don't support SLI (as in implicit multi-GPU)

 

[Krzych]

For ampere GPU's. Not the previous series.

Well obviously for Ampere GPUs, this is what this article is about, why would anyone even think I am talking about previous series...

 

[kapone32]

I don't get it. I understand that SLI is not going to be supported in future games, nobody expects that at this point, but to disable all support for existing ones?

Well they do still have support but you would have to spend $3000 to get it on Nvidia. BTW my Vega 64 crossfire is faster than the 3080 in Strange Brigade and Doom Eternal. There is nothing wrong with SLI or crossfire. AMD even allows you to apply crossfire to just about any DX11 Game (Not suggested). I know for myself I will be getting 2 Big Navi cards since my favourite Game (Total War Warhammer) has full support for multi GPU DX12. I know that there are tons of people that think Multi GPU is passe but at the end of the day it is my computer and my money to do with as I please.

 

[Metroid]

I never liked sli and for good reason. Thankgod is as good as dead. More problems than solutions but I believe nvidia will come up with something else in the future similar to sli, adding more gpus doubling graphics power.

 

[Seyumi]

I'm confused too. If I get 2x SLI RTX 3090's, will it still support the dozens of various DX11 titles in my Steam library that support SLI? Or is that now purposely disabled and will only work with DX12 titles that support multi-GPU that the game developers have to support (and not Nvidia)?

 

[kapone32]

I'm confused too. If I get 2x SLI RTX 3090's, will it still support the dozens of various DX11 titles in my Steam library that support SLI? Or is that now purposely disabled and will only work with DX12 titles that support mGPU?

It will support them.

 

[TheLostSwede]

I'm just curious, when is Nvidia going to update their driver UI, as it's circa Y2K design is getting a bit long in the tooth...
In fact, the attached screenshot offers a better view of the interface than the poor scaling Nvidia's interface has on my 4K screen...

 

[Assimilator]

Holy shit some of you people are dumb.

NVIDIA is not "taking SLI away" on Ampere, because SLI on Ampere was never there to begin with.

It will support them.

But the second card will do nothing.

Unless you have a specific game that you know implements mGPU support via a graphics API, there is no point in buying more than one RTX 3000-series card.

 

[kapone32]

But the second card will do nothing.

Meaning that unless you have a specific game that you know implements mGPU support via a graphics API, there is no point in buying more than one RTX 3000-series card.

But the second card will do nothing.

Meaning that unless you have a specific game that you know implements mGPU support via a graphics API, there is no point in buying more than one RTX 3000-series card.

Right but "Seyumi" asked about his DX11 library of Multi GPU supported Games. For DX12 you are absolutely right.

 

[Assimilator]

Right but "Seyumi" asked about his DX11 library of Multi GPU supported Games. For DX12 you are absolutely right.

Apparently you can't read either. The changelog states "Implicit SLI Disabled on NVIDIA Ampere GPUs". It does not state "Implicit SLI Disabled on NVIDIA Ampere GPUs except in DirectX 11".

There is no SLI on Ampere. There is multi-GPU support if and only if it's implemented via a graphics API. DirectX 11 does not have multi-GPU functionality, therefore no DirectX 11 games can have any sort of multi-GPU support on Ampere.

 

[lightofhonor]

Did Nvidia just highlight that a 3080 with a 360hz display will have lower latency than a 1660 super at 60hz?

 

[Seyumi]

Looks like I more people are confused than me. It's a simple question:

I have 19 DirectX 11 games in my Steam library that I know support SLI and have a SLI profile.

If I buy 2x RTX 3090's for that magic 4K 120FPS (minimum) #, will I still be getting proper SLI support on my 19 DX11 games? or has Nvidia just purposely disabled that on the 3000 series and I would only get SLI support on 2000 series GPU's and below?

 

[Lindatje]

[World of Warcraft]: Objects randomly flicker. [3101638

This is not fixed!

Also still driver errors with call of duty warzone.