NVIDIA have released the 435.17 beta driver with Vulkan and OpenGL support for PRIME render offload

NVIDIA have a little present available for Linux fans today, with the release of the 435.17 beta driver now being available.

This is a beta driver and it includes quite the highlight with the addition of PRIME render offload support for Vulkan and OpenGL. This is where you might have your Intel GPU running most normal applications, with an NVIDIA chip then powering your games. It's usually found in Notebooks and it's been a source of annoyance for NVIDIA Notebook owners for a long time, so it's really pleasing to see proper progress like this.

It comes with some caveats though, as it needs a very up to date X.Org Server with git commits not available in a normal release yet. However, if you're on Ubuntu 19.04 or 18.04 NVIDIA have provided a PPA. There's a little additional work needed for now too, you can read more about the PRIME render offload support here.

For the rest of what's in this new driver, it has the usual assortment of bug fixes and "experimental support for runtime D3 (RTD3) power management on Turing notebook GPUs". The full changelog can be found here.