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A pretty interesting NVIDIA beta driver has landed and it officially enables their OpenGL threaded optimizations by default. It will turn itself off if it detects that it's degrading performance per-application.

Another very interesting one is that it now supports the 'ARB_parallel_shader_compile' extension to allow multi-threaded compilation of GLSL shaders.

Nvidia-settings will now let you see displays configured with PRIME.

There's more too, like bits towards helping Wayland but that's not interesting to us right now until Wayland really becomes mainstream.

See the full release notes here. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Beta, Drivers, NVIDIA
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11 comments

Xpander Jan 18, 2017
tested Deus EX MD so far, shader compile seems slow as before, probaly feral doesnt use the new trick.
driver seems to work well though :) need more testing about the GL THREADED
rea987 Jan 18, 2017
Any news regarding Launchpad PPA?
gurv Jan 18, 2017
Wow enabling glthread by default is a bold move.
They got to be confident in their detection algorithm because this feature can seriously degrade performance in some cases (and boost in others ofc).
spiffyk Jan 18, 2017
Us gamers should really be looking forward to Wayland. Especially those who use Optimus laptops because X can't use that properly. Yeah, we have PRIME and Bumblebee but both are basically hacks, prone to bugs and are rather inconvenient to use. Wayland can handle Optimus out-of-the-box and I can't wait to have proper Wayland-supporting drivers to make use of that.
Gobo Jan 18, 2017
Quoting: Xpandertested Deus EX MD so far, shader compile seems slow as before, probaly feral doesnt use the new trick.
driver seems to work well though :) need more testing about the GL THREADED

Is that why after every few starts the game will show lots of concept art pictures with a slowly crawling progress bar before even running all the developer/publisher intros?
Xpander Jan 18, 2017
Quoting: GoboIs that why after every few starts the game will show lots of concept art pictures with a slowly crawling progress bar before even running all the developer/publisher intros?

yes, its compiling shaders with new drivers.
marvtowel Jan 19, 2017
A little slower and introduced some issues. Planetary Annihilation: TITANS and Insurgency would hang for a second here and there. Reverted back to the 375.26 driver and everything went back to normal. Maybe a bit early for this one.
Xpander Jan 19, 2017
Quoting: marvtowelA little slower and introduced some issues. Planetary Annihilation: TITANS and Insurgency would hang for a second here and there. Reverted back to the 375.26 driver and everything went back to normal. Maybe a bit early for this one.

i did not notice this, but i teste ARK Survival Evolved and it seemed to disable GL THREADED there, though when i forcly enable it i will get huge performance boost.
so it doesnt seem to work as expected yet


Last edited by Xpander on 19 January 2017 at 9:28 am UTC
tuubi Jan 19, 2017
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Quoting: marvtowelA little slower and introduced some issues. Planetary Annihilation: TITANS and Insurgency would hang for a second here and there. Reverted back to the 375.26 driver and everything went back to normal. Maybe a bit early for this one.
Too early for a beta?
mrdeathjr Jan 19, 2017
At simple seek this drivers works normally with wine 2.0 rc5

View video on youtube.com

However more tests are needed

^_^

​​​​​​​
PJ Jan 20, 2017
installed and seems to be working ok on my end (gtx 980).
Sadly it does not seem we're any closer to Wayland support as (unless I overlooked something) Nvidia still pushes for egl streams, not gbm , which is not according to the spec and would mean the compositor would have to be written specifically for the Nvidia driver (which would be insanity).
Nvidia why you fail us in this matter...
After working on machine with Wayland I'd literally love to have it on my workstation.
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