Looks like Valve is making progress towards releasing SteamOS on other platforms.

Original blog: https://zamundaaa.github.io/wayland/2024/04/05/explicit-sync.html

#What is Nvidia Blackwell? Named after David Blackwell, the first black scholar inducted into the National Academy of Science, Blackwell (GB200, which stands for Grace-Blackwell 200) follows the success of its predecessor, Hopper(GH100, which stands for Grace-Hopper 100), which boosted Nvidia’s sales.

For anybody who is not familiar with the naming conventions of Nvidia’s chip world, G or Grace is the CPU used in Nvidia’s AI computing modules called DGX, and B or Blackwell is a GPU, which is an upgrade from the previous H or Hopper.

Nvidia Blackwell and the whole DGXGB200 SuperPOD AI computer Nvidia Blackwell and the whole DGXGB200 SuperPOD AI computer Apart from the apparent benchmark scores that Nvidia proudly wears on its chest, the most assuming part is that Nvidia has taken two dies or chips and just merged them without any loss of computational capabilities, giving birth to GB200, which is insane from an engineering perspective.

One of the direct competitors, AMD MI300, will indeed be shivering when they hear these numbers.

The new Blackwell ship is 4–5 times faster than its predecessor, Hopper. But when integrated into its environment of DGX Module, it becomes a beast and outputs almost 30x the inference performance, yes, not 30% but 30 times, and wait, wait, there is more, all while consuming 25X less power again that is not 25% its 25 times. This allows LLM’s models to train on over 27 trillion parameters. For comparison, the famous ChatGPT 4.0 was trained on 1.7 trillion parameters. Blackwell will be made in partnership with Nvidia’s best friend, TSMC, during a fantastic 3 nm fabrication process. It has 208 billion transistors, allowing data speeds up to 10Tb/sec. Amazing right?

#How is Blackwell(GB200) better than Hopper GPU(GH100)?

The previous generation of AI-optimized GPUs was called Hopper. Blackwell is between 2 and 30 times faster, depending on how you measure it. Huang explained that it took 8,000 GPUs, 15 megawatts, and 90 days to create the GPT-MoE-1.8T model. With the new system, you could use just 2,000 GPUs and 25% of the power.

Blackwell is genuinely a very successful replacement for the Hopper GPU because it builds upon GH100’s strengths and fills in the gaps or limitations, like improved communication bottlenecks for a larger number of racks. It has no Memory locality issues or cache storage issues.

This essentially means there are much lower bottlenecks when sharing data between servers, dramatically reducing the idle time for each GPU on each server. Thus, efficiency is boosted since more stuff gets done in the same clock cycles.

GB200 offers improved connectivity and data processing for AI tasks and is part of Nvidia’s “super chip” lineup, complementing its central processing unit, Grace.

Nvidia will definetly help AI to reach new heights. Click the link to visit and read the full blog.

Game Ready Driver 537.13 has been released.

Article Here: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/starfield-game-ready-driver/

Game Ready Driver Download Link: Link Here

New feature and fixes in driver 537.13:

Game Ready - This new Game Ready Driver provides the best gaming experience for the latest newgames including Starfield and the ICARUS: New Frontiers expansion.

Fixed Gaming Bugs

• [Battlefield 2042] Game stability can decrease when applying GeForce Experience Freestyle filters [4170804]
• [Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart] Performance fluctuations due to issues between DirectStorage and NVIDIA Reflex [4212649]

Fixed General Bugs

• [Vegas Pro FX] Preview not working on some notebook configurations [3752618]

Open Issues

• [Halo Infinite] Significant performance drop is observed on Maxwell-based GPUs. [4052711]
• [DaVinci Resolve] This driver implements a fix for creative application stability issues seen during heavy memory usage. We’ve observed some situations where this fix has resulted in performance degradation when running DaVinci Resolve. This will be addressed in an upcoming driver release. [4172676]

Driver Downloads and Tools

Driver Download Page: Nvidia Download Page

Latest Game Ready Driver: 537.13 WHQL

Latest Studio Driver: 536.99 WHQL

DDU Download: Source 1 or Source 2

DDU Guide: Guide Here

DDU/WagnardSoft Patreon: Link Here

Documentation: Game Ready Driver 537.13 Release Notes | Studio Driver 536.99 Release Notes

Submit driver feedback directly to NVIDIA: Link Here

Having Issues with your driver? Read here!

Before you start - Make sure you Submit Feedback for your Nvidia Driver Issue

There is only one real way for any of these problems to get solved, and that’s if the Driver Team at Nvidia knows what those problems are. So in order for them to know what’s going on it would be good for any users who are having problems with the drivers to Submit Feedback to Nvidia. A guide to the information that is needed to submit feedback can be found here.

Additionally, if you see someone having the same issue you are having in this thread, reply and mention you are having the same issue. The more people that are affected by a particular bug, the higher the priority that bug will receive from NVIDIA!!

Common Troubleshooting Steps

• Be sure you are on the latest build of Windows 10 or 11
• Please visit the following link for DDU guide which contains full detailed information on how to do Fresh Driver Install.
• If your driver still crashes after DDU reinstall, try going to Go to Nvidia Control Panel -> Managed 3D Settings -> Power Management Mode: Prefer Maximum Performance

If it still crashes, we have a few other troubleshooting steps but this is fairly involved and you should not do it if you do not feel comfortable. Proceed below at your own risk:

• A lot of driver crashing is caused by Windows TDR issue. There is a huge post on GeForce forum about this here. This post dated back to 2009 (Thanks Microsoft) and it can affect both Nvidia and AMD cards.
• Unfortunately this issue can be caused by many different things so it’s difficult to pin down. However, editing the windows registry might solve the problem.
• Additionally, there is also a tool made by Wagnard (maker of DDU) that can be used to change this TDR value. Download here. Note that I have not personally tested this tool.

If you are still having issue at this point, visit GeForce Forum for support or contact your manufacturer for RMA.

Common Questions

• Is it safe to upgrade to ? Fact of the matter is that the result will differ person by person due to different configurations. The only way to know is to try it yourself. My rule of thumb is to wait a few days. If there’s no confirmed widespread issue, I would try the new driver.

Bear in mind that people who have no issues tend to not post on Reddit or forums. Unless there is significant coverage about specific driver issue, chances are they are fine. Try it yourself and you can always DDU and reinstall old driver if needed.

• My color is washed out after upgrading/installing driver. Help! Try going to the Nvidia Control Panel -> Change Resolution -> Scroll all the way down -> Output Dynamic Range = FULL.
• My game is stuttering when processing physics calculation Try going to the Nvidia Control Panel and to the Surround and PhysX settings and ensure the PhysX processor is set to your GPU
• What does the new Power Management option “Optimal Power” means? How does this differ from Adaptive? The new power management mode is related to what was said in the Geforce GTX 1080 keynote video. To further reduce power consumption while the computer is idle and nothing is changing on the screen, the driver will not make the GPU render a new frame; the driver will get the one (already rendered) frame from the framebuffer and output directly to monitor.

Remember, driver codes are extremely complex and there are billions of different possible configurations. The software will not be perfect and there will be issues for some people. For a more comprehensive list of open issues, please take a look at the Release Notes. Again, I encourage folks who installed the driver to post their experience here... good or bad.

Did you know NVIDIA has a Developer Program with 150+ free SDKs, state-of-the-art Deep Learning courses, certification, and access to expert help. Sound interesting? Learn more here.