Not long after the recent developer-focused 440.66.17 Vulkan Beta, NVIDIA have released the 450.51 Linux Beta Driver in their mainline series that's for us consumers to jump in with.
This adds in a number of new features like support for Vulkan direct-to-display on DisplayPort displays which are connected via DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport (DP-MST). NVIDIA added support in this Linux driver for NVIDIA NGX which appears to include DLSS, their deep learning powered technology stack. It also now has HEVC 10/12 bit "decode only" support for NVIDIA VDPAU, support for Image Sharpening in OpenGL and Vulkan applications, support to create 16-bit video surfaces in the NVIDIA VDPAU driver and more VDPAU additions.
Even PRIME support was expanded to allow PRIME Synchronization when using displays driven by the x86-video-amdgpu driver as PRIME display offload sinks and support for displays connected to NVIDIA GPUs to act as PRIME display offload sinks, also known as "Reverse PRIME". A fallback presentation path for PRIME Render Offload configurations where the DRI3 and/or Present extension are unavailable was added too.
There's also now extended dynamic runtime power management, to support shutting off power to video memory under certain conditions. Documentation saw a little improvement too, with a new file supported-gpus.json, which gives a machine-readable list of supported GPUs and their features.
NVIDIA also added an implementation of glNamedBufferPageCommitmentARB, which they said was actually missing from the driver's support for the GL_ARB_sparse_buffer extension.
When it comes to bug fixes, there's plenty of them too. A bug preventing X11 EGL displays from being reinitialized was solved, a bug where rendering in a separate user namespace (unshare -U) would show black window and produce Xid 13 errors was squashed, Vulkan applications should no longer leak file descriptors when destroying Vulkan instances, the Plasma desktop from KDE should no longer see the panel freeze when compositing is disabled (hooray!) and the Plasma session should hopefully no longer crash when running under Wayland.
See the 450.51 release page here.
They didn't stop there either. The 'Long Lived' driver was also updated to 440.100, bringing in new GPU support and it adds a workaround for some Pascal based notebooks, where the GPU could fall off the bus when idle.
Even the legacy driver 390.138 was released for older GPUs, fixing a bunch of Linux kernel 5.6 issues and it adds PRIME Synchronization support for Linux kernel 5.4 and newer.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
TheRiddick Jun 25, 2020
EagleDelta Jun 25, 2020
Quoting: BeamboomI wonder how long it will take for this one to reach Ubuntu 20.04 via their official PPA? As the current newest available driver is the 440.64. Very odd since Ubuntu 19.10 has the .82 for a long time already.
I can't speak for Ubuntu's NVidia packages, but at least with Pop!_OS, they only support stable drivers. Beta drivers never get pushed to the Pop!_OS GFX ppa.
Quoting: EagleDeltaI can't speak for Ubuntu's NVidia packages, but at least with Pop!_OS, they only support stable drivers. Beta drivers never get pushed to the Pop!_OS GFX ppa.
Ah damn it's just another beta. Right. I just saw "mainline" and thought it was a new stable. Thanks.
Luke_Nukem Jun 25, 2020
Quoting: Luke_NukemAnyone curious about reverse prime - it works, but not well. The relevant topic is here in the Nvidia forums.
I'm not sure I even got what it's about. :)
Prime: Plug cable into Computer display output while using the dedicted GPU,
Reverse Prime: Plug cable into GPU output while using the graphics unit of the CPU
- is that it?
Luke_Nukem Jun 27, 2020
Quoting: EikeQuoting: Luke_NukemAnyone curious about reverse prime - it works, but not well. The relevant topic is here in the Nvidia forums.
I'm not sure I even got what it's about. :)
Prime: Plug cable into Computer display output while using the dedicted GPU,
Reverse Prime: Plug cable into GPU output while using the graphics unit of the CPU
- is that it?
Yes. It's to enable hotplugging external displays to discrete GPU while the iGPU is primary. It's a huge step towards Windows style behaviour for Optimus laptops.
Quoting: Xpanderlike on the 450.36.06 beta cuda drivers, this driver has the image sharpening built in :)
Image Sharpening
QuoteThe __GL_SHARPEN_ENABLE environment variable can be used to enable image sharpening for OpenGL and Vulkan applications. Setting __GL_SHARPEN_ENABLE=1 enables image sharpening, while setting __GL_SHARPEN_ENABLE=0 (default) disables image sharpening. The amount of sharpening can be controlled by setting the __GL_SHARPEN_VALUE environment variable to a value between 0 and 100, with 0 being no sharpening, 100 being maximum sharpening, and 50 being the default. The amount of denoising done on the sharpened image can be controlled with the __GL_SHARPEN_IGNORE_FILM_GRAIN environment variable, with 0 being no denoising, 100 being maximum denoising, and 17 being the default.
Thank you, had a very hard time finding out how to use this, its very buggy tho but I guess its since its beta drivers.
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