Nvidia and Microsoft have joined forces to integrate powerful AI capabilities into the Windows operating system, leveraging the innovative RTX technology. Both companies announced during the Microsoft Build developer conference, which marks a significant milestone in the advancement of AI.
During the conference, Nvidia unveiled its plan to bring its AI technologies (previously reserved for specialised applications) to the broader Windows user base. This initiative seeks to harness the immense potential of AI and make it accessible to a wider range of users for enhanced productivity, creativity, and overall computing experiences.
More than 400 Windows apps and games already employ AI technology, accelerated by dedicated processors on RTX GPUs called Tensor Cores. By leveraging Nvidia’s RTX platform, Windows users can expect significant performance gains across various AI-powered tasks.
Pavan Davuluri, corporate vice president of Windows silicon and system integration at Microsoft said, “AI will be the single largest driver of innovation for Windows customers in the coming years. By working in concert with Nvidia on hardware and software optimisations, we’re equipping developers with a transformative, high-performance, easy-to-deploy experience.”
Nvidia says that over the past few years, Microsoft has been building a powerful capability to run Linux directly within the Windows OS, called Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). The GPU manufacturer has also been working closely with Microsoft to deliver GPU acceleration and support for the entire Nvidia AI software stack inside WSL.
A partnership beyond gaming
“Developers can use Windows PC for all their local AI development needs with support for GPU-accelerated deep learning frameworks on WSL,” Nvidia wrote.
Nvidia has released its newest optimisations in Release 532.03 drivers that combine Olive-optimised models to deliver significant boosts in AI performance. The company adds, “Using an Olive-optimised version of the Stable Diffusion text-to-image generator with the popular Automatic1111 distribution, performance is improved over 2x with the new driver.”
“With AI coming to nearly every Windows application, efficiently delivering inference performance is critical — especially for laptops. Coming soon, Nvidia will introduce new Max-Q low-power inferencing for AI-only workloads on RTX GPUs,” Nvidia wrote.
Both companies are making various resources available for developers to test drive top generative artificial intelligence models on Windows PCs. An Olive-optimised version of the Dolly 2.0 large language model is available on Hugging Face. And a PC-optimized version of Nvidia NeMo large language model for conversational AI is coming soon.
Ely Greenfield, CTO of digital media at Adobe said, “AI, machine learning and deep learning power all Adobe applications and drive the future of creativity. Working with Nvidia we continuously optimise AI model performance to deliver the best possible experience for our Windows users on RTX GPUs.”
The partnership between Nvidia and Microsoft extends beyond gaming. With AI capabilities deeply embedded into the Windows operating system, users can expect improved performance in creative applications like photo and video editing moving forward.
Isa Muhammad is a writer and video game journalist covering many aspects of entertainment media including the film industry. He's steadily writing his way to the sharp end of journalism and enjoys staying informed. If he's not reading, playing video games or catching up on his favourite TV series, then he's probably writing about them.
