Today NVIDIA have released a fresh developer-focused Vulkan Beta Driver with support for more extensions and a little performance work included.
On the extension side, as of 440.66.17 the NVIDIA driver now supports these:
It's interesting to see VK_EXT_external_memory_host finally land in the driver, as it's been around since 2017 according to the linked spec. What does it do? This extension enables an application to import host allocations and host mapped foreign device memory to Vulkan memory objects. As for VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state, that was made available at the end of 2019, adds some more dynamic state to support applications that need to reduce the number of pipeline state objects they compile and bind.
On top of that, NVIDIA said they've also improved performance of vkCmdMultiDraw*IndirectCount on Pascal and earlier GPUs. See the Vulkan Beta 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 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.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
where's the link for the drivers?Check out the very first link in the article. The one that says "Vulkan Beta Driver"
RichardYao 23 Jun 2020
And we Ubuntu users still don't have a repository for experimenting with these beta drivers.
Install Ubuntu with / on ZFS, snapshot, install the Nvidia drivers outside of the package manager, do your experiments and then rollback. That is the best people can do until a PPA is made.
alejandro-bringas 23 Jun 2020
Whenever I try to install I have problems with OpenGL libraries like libGL or libGLU
Yes, apologies, I noticed after hitting publish and coming back to it that I forgot the link so I added it in twice. In future, if we do forget something, be sure to use correction report feature as that sends info to us directly that we may miss in comments. Cheers.The link was added to the article afterwards, at the time I had read it, it wasn't there. I even removed that part of my post.where's the link for the drivers?Check out the very first link in the article. The one that says "Vulkan Beta Driver"
Comandante Ñoñardo 24 Jun 2020
slaapliedje 24 Jun 2020
Are they going to give us decent VR support? Because i want to buy the new 3000 series at the end of the year but not having async reprojection is terrible and induces motion sickness.This! It is the thing that would make some games in VR playable theough Lroton, like Elite: Dangerous, which the last time I tried playing it, ran at a full 100fps slower than it did on Windows. Which is fine when you are in space and it is 150 vs 250. But in a station it was like 60 vs 160... and 60 in VR is terrible...
I wonder when (and if) Nvidia will release a new stable driver.
I'd imagine they're waiting for the Khronos ray tracing extension to be finalised.
However, as this is a provisional release, some functionality is likely to change before the final release, consequently we are asking that driver vendors not ship it in production drivers and that ISVs not use the provisional version in production applications.
Are they going to give us decent VR support? Because i want to buy the new 3000 series at the end of the year but not having async reprojection is terrible and induces motion sickness.
There is an extension in the works to solve this.
Comandante Ñoñardo 24 Jun 2020
I wonder when (and if) Nvidia will release a new stable driver.
I'd imagine they're waiting for the Khronos ray tracing extension to be finalised.
However, as this is a provisional release, some functionality is likely to change before the final release, consequently we are asking that driver vendors not ship it in production drivers and that ISVs not use the provisional version in production applications.
Maybe that is the reason that explain the delay of the Linux port of Metro Exodus.
slaapliedje 27 Jun 2020
As this game was mentioned in a recent conversation about why people don't use Linux on their desktops... sooner rather than later would be good for the Linux port to be released.I wonder when (and if) Nvidia will release a new stable driver.
I'd imagine they're waiting for the Khronos ray tracing extension to be finalised.
However, as this is a provisional release, some functionality is likely to change before the final release, consequently we are asking that driver vendors not ship it in production drivers and that ISVs not use the provisional version in production applications.
Maybe that is the reason that explain the delay of the Linux port of Metro Exodus.
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