Now that The Khronos Group has released the official Vulkan Ray Tracing API, which NVIDIA got in early it's all a bit more official with the NVIDIA 460.32.03 stable driver release.
Following on from their 460.27.04 Beta release back in December it's mostly the same. It's also now following their new driver naming scheme as we picked up before. On top of their dedicated developer-focused Vulkan / OpenGL drivers, they have their stable drivers like this which are now split between a "Production Branch" and a "New Feature Branch" with this 460.32.03 release being in the Production Branch (listed here).
The biggest thing is that this is a stable driver that supports the new cross-vendor Vulkan Ray Tracing API through these supported extensions:
- VK_KHR_acceleration_structure
- VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline
- VK_KHR_ray_query
- VK_KHR_pipeline_library
- VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations
On top of that this driver also adds support for these extensions:
- VK_NV_fragment_shading_rate_enums
- VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate
- VK_KHR_shader_terminate_invocation
- VK_EXT_shader_image_atomic_int64
- VK_KHR_copy_commands2
They improved their memory allocation strategy in nvidia-modeset.ko to reduce the likelihood of out-of-memory errors, plus support for RandR rotation and reflection while using an NVIDIA-driven display as a PRIME Display Offload sink and also support for "Reverse PRIME Bypass", an optimization that bypasses the bandwidth overhead of PRIME Render Offload and PRIME Display Offload in conditions where a render offload application is fullscreen, unredirected, and visible only on a given NVIDIA-driven PRIME Display Offload output.
For gamers, you will be pleased to know NVIDIA took on plenty of feedback and increased the OpenGL + Vulkan shader disk cache size to 1024MB and they gave it a new location. Lots more new, you can see the full changelog here.
If you missed the earlier news, NVIDIA are also preparing to support hardware accelerated XWayland.
This is not new, many games suffer these sorts of performance issues over time, even some very low graphics games like POE2 Deadfire have major memory leaks.. These issues also exist under Windows 10 btw..
Some people don't notice the issues of performance decline over time because their running at lower resolutions or running DLSS, or for some reason their computer component configuration doesn't cause the issue to be as severe.
Quoting: Beamboom... and now it's added to the graphics drivers PPA! (Ubuntu)They got added to the normal Ubuntu repositories for 18.04, 20.04 and 20.10 on the same day this time, so without the usual months long delay.https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers-460
I mostly stopped using the PPA since Ubuntu updates them in released distributions, but normally they do not get them on the day or the next day of release. Its usually around 2 months else.
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