Nvidia’s new Studio Driver optimizes 3D apps for latest RTX GPUs — unlock Unreal Engine 5 and more

Nvidia’s new Studio Driver optimizes 3D apps for latest RTX GPUs
(Image credit: Nvidia)

Today, Nvidia launched its April Studio Driver update with optimizations for most of the popular 3D apps such as Unreal Engine 5, Cinema4D, and Chaos Vantage. Plus, support for the new Nvidia Ominiverse connector from Blender and Redshift.

I recently got a chance to sit and chat with Nvidia's team as they demonstrated many of the new optimizations and capabilities. I was blown away not just by how realistic everything was rendered or the perfect lighting and shadows, but also by how blazing fast everything was rendering. Nvidia also enhanced the speed and capability of the team workflows, making it a fantastic and clean work environment for a host of digital artists to collaborate within.

This latest Studio Driver adds support for many creative applications like Unreal Engine 5's Lumen, which is a fully dynamic global illumination system for both hardware and software ray tracing. The update also improves RTX accelerated ray tracing and DLSS in the UE5 viewport for real-time visuals, which is important when creating.

Not only will users experience beautifully rendered ray-tracing graphics but also higher frame rates from creation to the final product. Thanks to Nvidia Reflex in UE5, users gaming with RTX GPUs will experience new levels of low latency. After seeing it live, I'm excited to see its potential. 

When combined with some of the latest workstations from partners like Lenovo, Asus, and MSI, creators will have many options to take advantage of the new Studio Driver to create their digital masterpieces. With Nvidia real-time denoisers providing real-time performance levels not seen before that allow for improved efficiency in the art pipeline, RTX global illumination, and light mapping, the possibilities for users are endless.

I could go on and on, which I did when talking with Nvidia's team, but you can see what the new Studio Driver is capable of by checking out some recent work by Andrew Averkin, who is a Ukraine-based 3D artist who specializes in creating photorealistic 3D scenes.

He created multiple pieces of art using the Nvidia Omniverse Create app, Autodesk 3ds Max, which was accelerated by the Nvidia RTX A6000 GPU, and the work speaks for itself. I shared the work with my 12-year-old daughter and she stared silently for over 30 minutes. We then spent a while watching videos on Nvidia's Omniverse YouTube channel, which I highly recommend.

Mark Anthony Ramirez

Mark has spent 20 years headlining comedy shows around the country and made appearances on ABC, MTV, Comedy Central, Howard Stern, Food Network, and Sirius XM Radio. He has written about every topic imaginable, from dating, family, politics, social issues, and tech. He wrote his first tech articles for the now-defunct Dads On Tech 10 years ago, and his passion for combining humor and tech has grown under the tutelage of the Laptop Mag team. His penchant for tearing things down and rebuilding them did not make Mark popular at home, however, when he got his hands on the legendary Commodore 64, his passion for all things tech deepened. These days, when he is not filming, editing footage, tinkering with cameras and laptops, or on stage, he can be found at his desk snacking, writing about everything tech, new jokes, or scripts he dreams of filming.