NVIDIA have a new Vulkan Beta driver out - further polishing Ray Tracing support

Today NVIDIA put out a brand new Vulkan Beta driver, as they continue to expand the capabilities of Vulkan Ray Tracing with a bunch of fixes.

If you missed the big announcement last month, The Khronos Group released the provisional cross-vendor Ray Tracing extensions for Vulkan. NVIDIA were quickly out of the gate with a driver to support it and they continue to fix it up. There's going to likely be a lot of issues and changes, as the Ray Tracing extensions go through more testing and discussions towards being finalised. With that in mind driver version 440.66.09 is not a big release comprising of mostly bug fixes. Here's the release notes:

• New:
  • Added support for more acceleration structure vertex formats
• Fixes:
  • Fixed some VkPhysicalDeviceRayTracingFeaturesKHR to be advertised correctly for the current GPU
  • Fixed potential crash when pipeline pInputAssemblyState is NULL for mesh shaders
  • Fixed memory alignment and type for ray tracing scratch memory
  • Fixed some issues with ray tracing queries
  • Fixed an issue with ray tracing pipeline creating with pipeline libraries
  • Fixed some window state transitions when using HDR [Windows]

See the Vulkan Beta driver page here.

Reminder: you know it's a special Beta driver thanks to the additional two numbers on the end of the version string, with the newest stable version of the NVIDIA driver for Linux at 440.82 which released on April 7. This special Vulkan developer beta driver is where all the shiny new stuff goes in before making its way into the stable release for everyone.