While the main focus of the GeForce 378.66 graphics driver release is support for For Honor, Halo Wars 2, and Sniper Elite 4, NVIDIA has added something major into the 378 branch: OpenCL 2.0 is now available for evaluation.
OpenCL 2.0 support is not complete yet, but at least NVIDIA is now clearly intending to roll it out to end-users. Among other benefits, OpenCL 2.0 allows kernels (think shaders) to, without the host intervening, enqueue work onto the GPU. This saves one (or more) round-trips to the CPU, especially in workloads where you don’t know which kernel will be required until you see the results of the previous run, like recursive sorting algorithms.
Another major addition is Video SDK 8.0. This version allows 10- and 12-bit decoding of VP9 and HEVC video. So… yeah. Applications that want to accelerate video encoding or decoding can now hook up to NVIDIA GPUs for more codecs and features.
NVIDIA’s GeForce 378.66 drivers are available now.
