Nvidia Creator Ready Drivers?

Published:
by: Jack 'NavJack27' Mangano Estimated reading time: ~4 minutes

A Promise, Broken

Please throw some money my way either directly VIA PayPal or with my Ko-Fi maybe don’t do my Patreon until I fully set it up.

Why oh why Nvidia do you need to make these extravagant promises with your drivers? Creator Ready Driver releases are timed to key creative application updates, ensuring the best compatibility and performance for those who depend on PCs for their creative work. I’m struggling to figure out what the actual benefit to this new type of Nvidia driver is. Is it just the Quadro drivers with official modding to the INF file to allow certified install on GeForce cards? Either way eventually more people than I will set forth on testing these claims. I’ve only had the time today to test with Blender version 2.80.52 and the BMW test scene & Gooseberry scene

Release Notes

Creator Ready Driver releases are timed to key creative application updates, ensuring the best compatibility and performance for those who depend on PCs for their creative work.

Creator Ready

Provides the optimal experience for Autodesk Arnold, Unreal Engine 4.22, REDCINE-X PRO, Adobe Lightroom, and Substance Designer by Adobe

Performance

Increases performance in popular creative applications vs. the previous driver branch. Here are some examples of measured gains:

GeForce RTX 2080

  • Up to 13% in Blender Cycles
  • Up to 9% in Adobe Photoshop CC
  • Up to 9% in Adobe Premiere Pro CC
  • Up to 8% in CINEMA 4D

Link to more information & download

Testing

Specs

Rig used for testing was my main machine:

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

Type Item Price
CPU Intel - Core i7-8700K 3.7 GHz 6-Core Processor Purchased For $420.98
CPU Cooler Noctua - NH-D15 82.5 CFM CPU Cooler Purchased For $89.95
Motherboard Gigabyte - Z370 AORUS Gaming 7 (rev. 1.0) ATX LGA1151 Motherboard Purchased For $237.59
Memory Corsair - Vengeance LPX 32 GB (4 x 8 GB) DDR4-2666 Memory Purchased For $179.99
Storage SanDisk - Ultra II 480 GB 2.5” Solid State Drive Purchased For $140.00
Storage PNY - CS1311 960 GB 2.5” Solid State Drive Purchased For $227.00
Case Fractal Design - Define S ATX Mid Tower Case Purchased For $80.00
Power Supply SeaSonic - PRIME Titanium 850 W 80+ Titanium Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply Purchased For $200.00
Case Fan Noctua - NF-A14 FLX 68 CFM 140mm Fan Purchased For $19.95
Other EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti XC BLACK EDITION GAMING, 11G-P4-2282-KR, 11GB GDDR6, Dual HDB Fans & RGB LED Purchased For $1249.99
Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
Total $2845.45
Generated by PCPartPicker 2019-03-29 19:50 EDT-0400

Test Results

Blender 2.80.52
BMW Scene
Gooseberry Benchmark 1.0
Time Driver Optimize Compute Time Driver Optimize Compute
00:49.85 Creator Ready off 05:41.65 Creator Ready off
00:49.89 Creator Ready off 05:43.35 Creator Ready off
00:49.95 Creator Ready off Creator Ready off
00:49.92 Creator Ready off Creator Ready off
00:49.96 Creator Ready on 05:41.67 Creator Ready on
00:49.90 Creator Ready on 05:44.28 Creator Ready on
00:49.91 Creator Ready on Creator Ready on
00:49.91 Creator Ready on Creator Ready on
00:49.90 Game Ready off 05:41.56 Game Ready off
00:49.82 Game Ready off 05:43.07 Game Ready off
00:49.84 Game Ready off Game Ready off
00:49.86 Game Ready off Game Ready off
00:49.90 Game Ready on 05:41.56 Game Ready on
00:49.81 Game Ready on 05:43.03 Game Ready on
00:49.78 Game Ready on Game Ready on
00:49.80 Game Ready on Game Ready on

Thoughts

I’m not even going to bother eating up your bandwidth with charts on this one. You can plainly see that there is no difference with these drivers compared to the standard Game Ready drivers of the same version. Possibly their claim of increased performance was against an older version of the drivers. If that is the case then what the fuck is the point of these Creator Ready drivers if the same exact versioned drivers but for gaming has the same performance? I tested the thing with the largest claim of performance uplift and saw statistically insignificant changes. Nvidia… I am disappoint.