NVIDIA 510.39.01 Beta driver out for Linux

After silently launching the RTX 3080 12GB, NVIDIA has also today put out a brand new Beta driver for Linux with version 510.39.01 now available.

The interesting part is, the changelog mentions quite a number of things that were added in previous driver releases like support for the GBM API. There's also mentions of extensions that were added in previous stable releases too. It's likely that this will be their new "Production Branch" driver that has pulled over lots of changes from their "New Feature Branch". Confused? NVIDIA explain it like so:

Production Branch Production Branch drivers provide ISV certification and optimal stability and performance for Unix customers. This driver is most commonly deployed at enterprises, providing support for the sustained bug fix and security updates commonly required.

New Feature Branch New Feature Branch drivers provide early adopters and bleeding edge developers access to the latest driver features before they are integrated into the Production Branches

Some extensions have jumped over in 510.39.01 from their other standalone Vulkan Beta Drivers though, and some are newly supported like these:

• VK_EXT_depth_clip_control
• VK_EXT_border_color_swizzle
• VK_EXT_image_view_min_lod
• VK_KHR_shader_integer_dot_product
• VK_EXT_primitive_topology_list_restart
• VK_EXT_load_store_op_none
• VK_KHR_maintenance4
• VK_KHR_format_feature_flags2
• VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering

With Dynamic Rendering (VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering) being one of the major additions, something that The Khronos Group announced in late 2021 that many developers seemed excited about. This release newly brings AV1 decode support to the NVIDIA VDPAU driver, and brings on an optimization for the Vulkan fullscreen presentation path for X11 and direct-to-display swapchains. On top of that they've added a GUI control for setting Image Sharpening values in the app profiles page of the nvidia-settings control panel.

Some of the bug fixes include:

• Fixed several issues which caused the supported-gpus.json file to contain incorrect product information.
• Fixed a bug that caused the nvidia-settings control panel to report inaccurate ECC error counts, and completely prevented the reporting of aggregate ECC error counts. ECC error counts reported by nvidia-smi were not affected.
• Fixed a bug which caused Vulkan applications to hang when the __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS environment variable was set to enable threaded optimizations in the NVIDIA driver.
• Fixed a bug where calls to vkWaitForPresentKHR would fail with VK_TIMEOUT on Maxwell and Pascal GPUs.
• Fixed a bug in the Vulkan compiler where 64-bit atomics were partially broken.
• Fixed a bug in the Vulkan driver where VK_NULL_HANDLE was not properly handled as input to VkRenderingFragmentShadingRateAttachmentInfoKHR.imageView.
• Fixed a bug in the Vulkan driver where the SPIR-V Centroid interpolation decoration was not ignored when used in conjunction with FragCoord.
• Fixed a bug in the Vulkan driver where unreferenced descriptor bindings were sometimes not ignored properly.
• Fixed a bug in the Vulkan driver where vkCmdBindDescriptorSets would not properly handle pDynamicOffsets for compute pipelines.
• Fixed a bug which caused OpenGL and Vulkan applications to generate excessive traffic over dbus while attempting to communicate with nvidia-powerd, even though nvidia-powerd was not running.
• Fixed a bug in the Vulkan driver where some Ray Tracing shaders would timeout, resulting in device loss.