NVIDIA 470.42.01 for Linux adds DLSS for Proton, Xwayland, asynchronous reprojection

This is it. The big one! NVIDIA has today released the NVIDIA 470.42.01 beta driver which brings in lots of fun new things and further improves their Linux support.

Firstly, as promised, they've now added an NVIDIA NGX build for use with Steam Play Proton and Wine. This means Windows games and applications can use DLSS when run through Proton and Wine, providing they have been updated to support the features of this new driver. You should at least be able to try out the Windows versions of DOOM Eternal, No Man's Sky and Wolfenstein: Youngblood with this new driver and Proton, as they use Vulkan. DirectX support for DLSS with Proton arrives "this Fall".

Support for the VK_QUEUE_GLOBAL_PRIORITY_REALTIME_EXT from the VK_EXT_global_priority extension was added, finally giving Linux / NVIDIA users asynchronous reprojection in SteamVR. For Linux users, you need the Beta version of SteamVR which added support for this as of version SteamVR 1.18.2 - so Valve were quick to have it readied.

Are you using or wanting to use Wayland? Good news there too. There's now "initial" support for hardware accelerated OpenGL and Vulkan rendering on Xwayland. However, there's some really fresh packages needed for it and some caveats too. You need DRM KMS enabled, Xwayland should be built from the current Git code as of at least commit "c468d34c" otherwise "it will fall back to a suboptimal path for presentation resulting in degraded performance", libxcb needs to be version 1.13 or later, egl-wayland version 1.1.7 or later and if you're on GNOME you need to have kms-modifiers enabled.

What are the Xwayland limitations? Currently it doesn't support the nvidia-settings app, there's no accelerated video decoding with VDPAU, no SLI / Multi-GPU, there's no "Frame Lock and Genlock" and also no "Front-buffer rendering for GLX applications". Hopefully now it's out, NVIDIA can focus on hooking up everything missing.

On top of that the "direct capture" mode for NvFBC "no longer causes flipping to be disabled for applications being captured", NVIDIA say this means G-SYNC can now also be used simultaneously with NvFBC direct capture.

More PRIME improvements too as well! Support was added for PRIME Display Offload where both the display offload source and display offload sink are driven by the NVIDIA X Driver, plus support for PRIME Display Offload where the display offload source is AMDGPU.

New extension support including:

• VK_EXT_global_priority_query
• VK_EXT_provoking_vertex
• VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state2
• VK_EXT_color_write_enable
• VK_EXT_vertex_input_dynamic_state
• VK_EXT_ycbcr_2plane_444_formats
• VK_NV_inherited_viewport_scissor

There's plenty more that's new including lots of bug fixes.

See the release page for more. For users on Arch Linux, TKG has updated their installer script.

Additionally, it was announced recently that Kepler-series GPUs being most of the 600/700 and some 800M would no longer see main driver updates after October 2021 and move to critical updates only.