NVIDIA 396.18 beta driver is out with a new Vulkan SPIR-V compiler to reduce shader compilation time

I'm currently on 384.130... but this sounds like a reason to upgrade to the latest.

Can I get it for 32bit??? :P

Quoting: stretch611Can I get it for 32bit??? :P

Get out :P

Excuse my confusion, is this new shader compiler for Vulkan only or also for OpenGL?

Quoting: Avehicle7887Excuse my confusion, is this new shader compiler for Vulkan only or also for OpenGL?

It's a new SPIR-V compiler, so I believe it'll be used for GL apps using the GL_ARB_gl_spirv extension to use SPIR-V shaders, but I don't think there's many (any?) using that right now since it's a recent extension.

According to the dxvk-users channel on Discord the new driver and compiler are not great. FPS are cut by half and rendering is terrible.

Yeah new driver has lots of issues, tesselation not working, bad performance, but shader compiles are a lot smoother and this driver also fixes the Sun glitch in GTA V with dxvk for me. but they need to work on it more.

anyway its just a beta driver, they can improve it and until then i can run their old compiler with:

export __GL_NextGenCompiler=0


edit: That info only involves vulkan with the new SPIR-V compiler, OpenGL is unaffected


Last edited by Xpander on 11 April 2018 at 8:26 am UTC

Also good to see that there is someone from nvidia in the DXVK issue tracker to pick up all these issues quickly.

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: rcritAccording to the dxvk-users channel on Discord the new driver and compiler are not great. FPS are cut by half and rendering is terrible.

It would surprise me if Nvidia would try to improve their Vulkan support significantly. All the Nvidia Optimus graphics cards in laptops still don't have acceptable Xorg Linux drivers.

And I can't login to the Plasma Wayland session via a discrete GTX 1050 card when I use the proprietary Nvidia drivers. Nvidia made their own EGL API implementation when everyone else wanted to use GBM.

The EGL solution worked via the proprietary drivers on my Gnome Wayland and Nvidia Optimus 425M Arch Linux laptop. But after certain updates it suddenly stopped working and the Wayland login option disappeared when I use the proprietary driver. The Wayland option returns when I use Nouveau. But I never had these severe issues with Wayland on AMD graphics cards or Intel integrated graphics.

Nvidia could have optimized their Pascal architecture for low-level API's like Vulkan if they really wanted this. But they focused their architecture twenty times more on the proprietary DX11 API. Even when they knew that DX11 is a huge bottleneck and that it's more taxing on the CPU and GPU.

There is an open alternative for G-Sync but Nvidia keeps pushing their proprietary solution.

I can understand that Nvidia wants to work together with Microsoft on new technology but why almost every time a new proprietary solution for essential hardware and API's.

"NVIDIA collaborates with Microsoft to bring proprietary DX12 development and debugging to the next level"
"NVIDIA G-SYNC gives you more of what you want in a gaming experience."
"Introduction to NVIDIA proprietary RTX and Microsoft DirectX Ray Tracing"

Their neglect for any solution that's not proprietary is really striking. And I think that this work philosophy really counteract 'the best and cheapest experience for customers' and 'to produce high quality software faster and easier'.

Because of all these reasons, plus NVIDIA GPP, is the motive behind the fact that I'm so eager for AMD's GPUs releases and, even through they are sometimes more expensive and having less performance than NVIDIA's GPUs (at least here on Brazil...even considering that everything is expensive here), I really want to buy just AMD from now on.

I just cannot support NVIDIA anymore and, personally, it's a shame that I have only NVIDIA GPUs on the computers on my house (including my notebook, where I cannot remove or change the GPU unfortunately because the GPU it is welded on the motherboard (bad, bad Dell..)).


Last edited by fjorgemota on 11 April 2018 at 10:41 am UTC

The 390 driver that comes with Ubuntu is horrible. I can't stop the tearing no matter what i do.
It works with 340, but that is old. I think it does not even support Vulkan.

Quoting: ImnotarobotThe 390 driver that comes with Ubuntu is horrible. I can't stop the tearing no matter what i do.
It works with 340, but that is old. I think it does not even support Vulkan.

Are you on a laptop or desktop?

If it is desktop , use ForceFullComposition option.

If it is a laptop , set up PrimeSync properly to eliminate all tearings.