NVIDIA Vulkan Beta 455.46.01 driver out now

NVIDIA have released another update to their quickly advancing Vulkan Beta Driver, with the 455.46.01 release out.

Quite a small release, building upon the last Vulkan Beta from earlier this month which adds in support for the VK_NV_fragment_shading_rate_enums extension:

This extension builds on the fragment shading rate functionality provided by the VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate extension, adding support for "supersample" fragment shading rates that trigger multiple fragment shader invocations per pixel as well as a "no invocations" shading rate that discards any portions of a primitive that would use that shading rate

There's also a bug fix for "perform fragment depth value clamping to [0,1] when the application doesn't enable VK_EXT_depth_range_unrestricted".

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 455.38 released on October 30 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 NVIDIA Vulkan Beta Driver here.