On March 30 of this year, NVIDIA released a new Game Ready Driver, 465.89. This driver supports brand-new video games and offers a fix for a few specific issues. The changes are varied, but there’s some big news buried in all the details. One of the big new shifts is that Nvidia is removing the lock on their GeForce line that prevented virtual GPU instances from running. Previously, the company didn’t allow GeForce customers to use this technology to run Windows VMs, but that’s finally changing. You could hack the GPU to get the function working, but it was too risky and unstable for widespread use.
In addition to all of this, OpenCL 3.0 also got thrown into the mix. This new version will allow for graphics API integrations to continually support OpenCL 1.2 functionality and Khronos implementations. The NVIDIA Game Ready Driver 465.89 included day-1 drivers for DIRT 5‘s ray-tracing update, as well as Evil Genius 2: World Domination. The updates also included SLI profiles for Shenmue III and The Medium.
One of the bigger changes though is actually huge. With a new set of tools for Virtualization On GeForce GPUs, everyone can create virtual GPUs that can be shared across multiple virtual machines
Support for Virtualization On GeForce GPUs has been something tech fiends and gamers have wanted for a long time. The ability to actually support multiple compute instances via one piece of hardware is a huge leap forward in the enterprise space in particular. It used to be much harder to get your hands on hardware and software that could support deploying a server that could support multiple simultaneous high-intensity loads. Gaming, in particular, was a big hurdle, but enterprise-grade render farms would also benefit here.
By layering in technologies such as Nvidia vGPU, the new deployment possibilities for AI and data science have been improved a fair bit. GeForce customers wanting to run a Linux host should be able to deploy such a setup now, allowing for multiple users to leverage GeForce GPU hardware for whatever their workload is. This would even allow game developers to test multiple instances of a game across a single hardware deployment, saving money when testing on Windows and Linux for new releases.
