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.