Nvidia releases 418.81 WHQL driver bringing support for mobile RTX chips and more

At CES last month Nvidia announced the mobile variants of RTX 2080, 2070, and 2060. Today, the GeForce Game Ready WHQL-certified 418.81 drivers were released to support those chips.

Razer’s Blade 15 Advanced, the Gigabyte Aero 15 X9, MSI’s G575 and GT75 Titan, and the Alienware Area-51m, are among the first wave of laptops releasing with these new mobile RTX chips. At CES, Nvidia claimed to have 40 laptops with 100 different configurations in development, so there’s certainly many more to come.

In addition to that, these new drivers also introduce “optimum performance” for the new Port Royal benchmark in 3DMark that aims to judge the performance of Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology.

There are no new game optimizations with this driver, but there are performance improvements for titles such as The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt for users with G-Sync enabled displays and an SLI configuration consisting Pascal and Maxwell GPUs.

With all of this, there are a few bug fixes as well:

[Gamestream][OS HDR]: Stream is not set to launch in HDR despite having HDR display attached to the PC and client. [2467526]
[GeForce Experience]: Share FPS overlay appears in the Twitter UWP app from the Microsoft Store. [2465033]
[G-SYNC]: Flickering may occurs in games if G-SYNC is enabled. [2399845]
[G-SYNC]: With G-SYNC enabled, after hot-plugging a G-SYNC display and then a GSYNC Compatible display, the right half of the G-SYNC Compatible display may go blank. [200484819]

As with every new driver release, there are a bunch of known issues, some of which are accompanied by workarounds that we have highlighted:

Windows 10 Issues

  • [GeForce RTX 20 series]: Event ID 14 error appears in event viewer logs when Digital Vibrance setting is changed. [2488424]
  • [SLI][Shadow of the Tomb Raider][G-SYNC]: Flickering occurs in the game when launched with SLI, HDR, and G-SYNC enabled [200467122]
  • [G-SYNC]: With a G-SYNC and G-SYNC Compatible display connected in clone mode, flashing occurs on games played on the G-SYNC display with G-SYNC enabled. [200482157]
  • [HDR][Ni no Kuni 2]: Enabling HDR causes the application to crash when launched. [2483952]
  • [ARK Survival]: Multiple errors and then blue-screen crash may occur when playing
  • the game. [2453173]
  • [Batman: Arkham Origins]: PhysX fog renders incorrectly. [2451459]
  • [Firefox]: Cursor shows brief corruption when hovering on certain links in Firefox. [2107201]
  • Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR) is not available for monitors with 4k2k timings. [2496987]
  • Random desktop flicker occurs on some multi-display PCs [2453059]

Additional Issues

  • 2079538 - Random DPC watchdog violation error when using multiple GPUs on motherboards with LX chips
  • 2107201-Cursor shows brief corruption when hovering on certain links in Firefox/Steam
  • 2449346-The Witcher 3 will BSOD with Bad Pool error randomly during gameplay
  • 2453173-ARK Survival may crash with bad pool caller error and eventual BSOD
  • 2488424-RTX 20 series: Event ID 14 error in event viewer when Digital Vibrance setting is changed
  • 2496987-DSR is not available for monitors with 4k2k timings

There are also new or updated SLI profiles for these titles:

Anthem
Assetto Corsa Competizione - AFR enabled for Turing GPUs
Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 - AFR enabled for Turing GPUs
Life is strange Season 2 - AFR enabled for Turing GPUs
NBA 2K19 - AFR enabled for Turing GPUs
Space Hulk Tactics - AFR enabled for Turing GPU

The 418.81 WHQL-certified drivers can be downloaded via the GeForce Experience app on Windows or via the links down below. The complete release notes are available here.

Desktop GPUs:
Download: Windows 7, 8, 8.1 | Windows 10 – Standard / DCH

Notebook GPUs:
Download: Windows 7, 8, 8.1 | Windows 10 - Standard / DCH

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