NVIDIA released a new 440.66.15 Vulkan Beta Driver

NVIDIA continue advancing their Vulkan drivers with a brand new Beta now available that pulls in a good bunch of fixes. This is driver version 440.66.15, released May 26.

Changelog for Linux:

• Fixed 16-bit SMin/SMax
• CPU performance improvements for VkFence creation and usage
• Fixed a bug where vkUpdateDescriptorSetWithTemplate would ignore the stride parameter for some VkDescriptorType values
• Fixed layout of compute shader shared memory that may have resulted in a compiler crash
• Fixed a bug where vkCreateSampler would fail with no borderColor data, even though it wasn't needed
• Fixed a compiler issue processing image operation with extra unused coordinate operand components
• Fixed writing to dynamically indexed vec2 and vec3 fragment color outputs

While the majority is bug fixing, it's nice to see a performance improvement make it in too!

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 beta driver is where all the shiny new stuff goes in before making its way into the stable release for everyone. Really, it's mostly aimed at developers and serious enthusiasts. Unless you need what's in them, it's generally best to wait for the stable drivers.

You can find the NVIDIA Vulkan Beta here.