New NVIDIA Vulkan Beta Driver 455.26.02 is out

Need the latest bleeding-edge Linux drivers from NVIDIA? There's a new release out of the Vulkan Beta Driver.

Quite a small driver release in terms of listed features with 455.26.02, which adds in two newer Vulkan Extensions:

• VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate
  • "This extension adds the ability to change the rate at which fragments are shaded. Rather than the usual single fragment invocation for each pixel covered by a primitive, multiple pixels can be shaded by a single fragment shader invocation."
• VK_KHR_shader_terminate_invocation
  • "This extension adds Vulkan support for the SPV_KHR_terminate_invocation SPIR-V extension. That SPIR-V extension provides a new instruction, OpTerminateInvocation, which causes a shader invocation to immediately terminate and sets the coverage of shaded samples to 0; only previously executed instructions will have observable effects."

Reminder: 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 use the stable drivers.

The newest stable versions of the main NVIDIA driver for Linux are at 450.80.02 released on September 30 from their "long lived" series or 455.28 released on October 7 from their "short lived" series. Confused? 

The difference can be a little confusing, NVIDIA explained the difference between short / long lived drivers as:

Any given release branch is either long-lived or short-lived. The difference is in how long the branch is maintained and how many releases are made from each branch. A short-lived branch typically has only one or two (non-beta) releases, while long-lived branches will have several.
[…]
When we make changes to the driver, we evaluate the oldest branch the change needs to go into. New features go into whatever the latest branch is, while bug fixes go into the older branches and are integrated through the newer branches. So using a short-lived branch doesn’t mean that you miss out on fixes, it just means that you also get the latest features.

You can find the Vulkan Beta 455.26.02 here.