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NVIDIA have release two new drivers over the last day! An update to their Vulkan beta driver as well as a new stable driver update for everyone.

Firstly their Vulkan beta driver, the special branch they use for testing new Vulkan API bits and more, has been rebased onto 435.17. They also mentioned that 8-bit integer support has been added to the VK_NV_cooperative_matrix extension and performance improvements have been taken from the 435.17 series.

Additionally, the bigger one here is the new 435.21 stable driver. This is almost the same as the recent beta release of 435.17, which is the update that finally brings in support for PRIME render offload. However, they also noted one extra bug fix over the beta "Fixed a bug that caused the X server to crash when using HardDPMS with an NVIDIA-driven GPU Screen.".

The 435.21 driver is part of their "Short Lived" series as opposed to the current "Long Lived" series at 430.40.

Confused on the difference? Here's what NVIDIA themselves said about it (source):

Any given release branch is either long-lived or short-lived. The difference is in how long the branch is maintained and how many releases made from each branch. A short-lived branch typically has only one or two (non-beta) releases, while long-lived branches will have several.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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7 comments

mrdeathjr Aug 30, 2019
In this vulkan dev driver version d9vk still working



^_^
Purple Library Guy Aug 30, 2019
So if you have hard PMS that no longer causes crashes? I guess that's a very good thing.
kaiman Aug 30, 2019
The versioning scheme employed by nVidia confuses me. Any sane person would assume that 435.21 supersedes 435.17 and contains all its features and then some. Apparently, that's not the case.

At the same time, it's not apparent how big the jump from, say, 430.40 to 435.21 would be, as there is no way to tell how many releases have been made in between. Could be none, could be half a dozen.

Anyone has any insight to share what those numbers actually represent? Is there any logic behind it?
Xpander Aug 30, 2019
435.21 supersedes 435.17, it contains all 435.17 has + the mentioned xorg crash fix.
435.19.02 vulkan beta driver is based on the same 435.17 also but adds some vulkan stuff on top and doesnt have the 435.21 xorg crash fix. while 435.21 doesnt have the extra vulkan stuff the 435.19.02 adds

430.40 is completely older branch. 435.21 has lots of new additions over this


basically first number is the major version, 410,418,430,435 - those include major additions.
second number is the fixes number - fixes and minor features on top of the major branch
third number (only for vulkan beta testing) - has extra vulkan testing extensions or fixes that will later be merged into next major number of stable drivers


Last edited by Xpander on 30 August 2019 at 6:54 pm UTC
Leeo97one Aug 30, 2019
I tested the new PRIME render offload thing on Arch Linux with the beta driver and this PKGBUILD for X.Org with the required patches provided by an NVIDIA dev: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/aplattner/arch-xorg-server
You may also need to remove the line 12 (PrimaryGPU thing) in:
/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-nvidia-drm-outputclass.conf

And it works pretty well! I'm very happy to have such a feature available right in the driver.


Last edited by Leeo97one on 31 August 2019 at 2:39 am UTC
jarhead_h Sep 2, 2019
Yeah, I updated my system and then rebooted to run the driver to find this :

Now I absolutely refuse to reset systemctl back to graphical because I know it's broken and it will be a PITA. So I'm on CentOS until I figure this out.

EDIT: Yep, a compiler mismatch.



EDIT 2: In this case, --no-cc-version-check option after the NVIDIA*.run actually worked. Just thinking back to my Windows days when I just would have nuked the whole install. God, I can't wait to get my 3900X/RX5700XT built.


Last edited by jarhead_h on 2 September 2019 at 3:40 am UTC
jens Sep 13, 2019
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Does anybody here faces this issue with NVidia Audio not being detected anymore with the new 435.21 version?
https://github.com/negativo17/nvidia-driver/issues/84
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