NVIDIA GeForce RTX Game Ready Drivers Bring DirectX Raytracing For Windows 10 October 2018 Update

Today, NVIDIA is further advancing its GeForce Game Ready drivers with the release of 416.16 WHQL drivers for the new Windows 10 October 2018 Update. This brings the first public release of DirectX Ray Tracing (DXR), which is Microsoft's API for ray-tracing. As NVIDIA notes, DXR provides an industry-standard API for all developers to access to leverage the power of GeForce RTX hardware.  

"With Microsoft’s official public support of DXR with its Windows 10 October 2018 Update and the GeForce RTX family of Turing-based GPUs, PC gamers can look forward to the first wave of next-generation titles with ray tracing," writes NVIDIA's Sean Pelletier. 

"Real-time raytracing is often quoted as being the holy grail of graphics and it’s a key part of a decades-long dream to achieve realism in games," adds Microsoft. "Today marks a key milestone in making this dream a reality: gamers now have access to both the OS and hardware to support real-time raytracing in games. With the first few titles powered by DirectX Raytracing just around the corner, we’re about to take the first step into a raytraced future."

In addition to support DXR in the October 2018 Update, the following fixes are provided with 416.16 WHQL drivers:

• [Pascal GPUs][Quake HD Remix]: Black square glitches appear when using the Quake HD Remix mod with soft shadows enabled. [2277990]
• [GeForce GTX 1060][Regime][Rainbow 6: Siege]: Temporal antialiasing causes a drop in performance. [2139724]
• [Titan Xp]: Driver error (nvlddmkm ) occurs on resume from S4. [200435536]
• [Turing GPU][[Netflix]: Playback resolution doesn't show 4K bit rates when using a
• USB-C-HDMI connection. [200449656]

As expected, there are also a number of outstanding issues in Windows 10 that will be addressed in future driver releases according to the release notes [PDF]:

• [Windows Defender Application Guard][vGPU][Surround]: Surround cannot be enabled from the NVIDIA Control Panel when running Edge Browser with Application Guard over vGPU. [200444614]
• [Windows Defender Application Guard][vGPU][Surround]: Edge Browser with Application Guard cannot be opened when Surround is enabled. [200443580]
• [GeForce GTX 1060]AV receiver switches to 2-channel stereo mode after 5 seconds of audio idle. [2204857]
• [GeForce GTX 1080Ti]: Random DPC watchdog violation error when using multiple GPUs on motherboards with PLX chips. [2079538]
• [Firefox]: Cursor shows brief corruption when hovering on certain links in Firefox. [2107201]
• [Windows Media Player][Notebook][MSHybrid]: The application crashes when run on the integrated graphics after setting the NVIDIA GPU Graphics settings to High Performance. [200450782]

As always, you can download the latest drivers for your NVIDIA graphics cards with the GeForce Experience app on your Windows 10 PC. If you prefer, you can grab them with a direct download via the two following links: Windows 10 64-bit for GeForce Desktop GPUs; Windows 10 64-bit for GeForce Notebook GPUs.