NVIDIA released a big new mainline Linux Beta Driver 450.51

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.