Nvidia "Studio" drivers

This may be old news to many but it surprised me yesterday. I have used DeNoise AI for many months now and it has never given me any trouble with my hardware or video card/video drivers. A couple of days ago the Nvidia drivers were updated and DeNoise started complaining about that. It couldn't run with the latest video driver and fell back to "CPU acceleration" which was noticeably slower and would often stop working. I sent Topaz customer support an e-mail and they said they were aware of the issue. The explanation was that Nvidia has a bug in the new driver and the current solution after a few Topaz/Nvidia programmer consultations is to fall back to the May driver version for now. Topaz kindly provided a link to that driver but the link sent me to the current driver so I went to Plan B.

I went to Nvidia customer support next, via their live online chat. After some discussion and system info investigation the Nvidia tech asked me if I was using the Game Ready driver or the Studio driver. Huh? I have always let the Nvidia app do it's own thing, and Game Ready was all I ever knew about. He said the Studio drivers are tailored to apps from Adobe and other similar apps. The current Studio driver version still didn't help with DeNoise but a slightly older version did the trick. Bingo, DeNoise is happy again.

Then as we were about to end the chat session he linked me to the newest Nvidia GeForce Experience app. It looks through your system for apps it knows how to set preferences for to maximize the app for an Nvidia card. For me it hit on these. Can it/does it really help? I can't say with certainty but my Lightroom is now loading faster. The "preferences" settings don't look any different then before but it does seems to run quicker.

I am on driver 462.59. The current 471.11 kills Topaz.

https://www.windowscen​tral.com …studio-and-gaming-drivers

https://www.nvidia.com …imal-application-settings

My Nvidia app is prompting me to update the drivers again. Topaz says the driver conflict still exists and to continue to hold off.

I've been using the studio drivers for a couple of years now. I don't know that the studio drivers are specifically designed for Adobe products...I think they're just the game drivers with further regression testing.

But right now I'm on studio driver version 471.68, release 8-10-2021

I've got a gaming PC that has NVidia GeForce. It does seem NVidia is like pretty much any other company now: you just have given presets and less customization. Before, my experience with NVidia was the Quadro line. With it being a professional card series, it's always had a control panel that lets you set custom settings for each application. It used to be it was the only line that was certified for 3D apps like Maya (an appp heavily reliant on OpenGL). In recent years, Maya has started to be certified for certain GeForce cards (and since there's Maya for the Mac, also AMD cards). There are certain features of Adobe apps that are OpenGL accelerated....so perhaps the tech saying "studio" is Adobe and other apps is that it is the certain apps that side more with OpenGL instead of DirectX. It could be that being switched to game, it isn't loading features that would require more processing (such as anti-aliasing, texture size, shadows, raytracing....other features you might not even use with your situations).

That's interesting, as I have the following installed on my Win 10 Pro 64 Desktop:

471.11-quadro-rtx-desktop-notebook-win10-64bit-international-dch-whql

The File Date is 28/06/2021 and Topaz AI seems to be running okay.

I have a Quadro M2000 Graphics card.

Cheers

Dennis