NVIDIA 550.40.07 Beta driver released with fixes for VRR and Wayland

Update 24/01/24 20:07 UTC: An NVIDIA developer messaged me to clarify the changelog oddness:

For this Beta release, we pulled a diff against the current Production release 535.154.05 since that captures everything from the previous production branch R535 to this new production branch R550 including the changes from R545. Enterprise customers are often not tracking the New Feature Branches like R545 so we do it this way to avoid our partners missing release highlights. 

I've given them feedback that it's not ideal for normal desktop consumers to do it like that, which they're hoping to improve in future. Ideally, giving us a simple way to see just the changes since the last release would suffice.

Original article below:

NVIDIA has today launched the 550.40.07 Beta driver for Linux which includes numerous important fixes, so you might want to jump in and give this one a thorough gaming test.

I have to be careful checking over NVIDIA driver releases, as they keep copy-pasting changelogs from previous versions. In this case, they've again copied over lots of the changes from previous driver releases. So keep that in mind. A fair few notes of what's listed were also in the 545.29.02 driver released back in October 2023. NVIDIA aren't really making it clear lately exactly what's new in each driver - which is frustrating. I have again tried to reach out to NVIDIA to find out what's happening with the changelogs lately.

Scanning over previous releases, it looks like these specifically may be actually new to this driver:

• Fixed an issue that sometimes caused Wayland applications to run at less than one frame per second on Maxwell, Volta, and Pascal series GPUs.
• Fixed a bug that caused an intermittent drop in desktop framerate.
• Fixed a bug that caused "Flip event timeout" messages to be printed to the system log when displays are hotplugged when nvidia-drm is loaded with the fbdev=1 kernel module parameter.
• Fixed intermittent Xid errors on Horizon Zero Dawn, Metro Exodus, Forza Horizon 5, and Halo Infinite.
• Fixed a bug which prevented the "NoMaxPClkCheck" mode validation token from working on single-link TMDS (e.g. DVI, HDMI) outputs.
• Fixed a bug that allowed VRR displays to be driven below their minimum refresh rate, resulting in a blank or flickering image.
• Added an application profile to improve Kwin performance on hybrid GPU systems by setting OGL_DEDICATED_HW_STATE_PER_CONTEXT=ENABLE_ROBUST.
• Updated the build process for NVIDIA kernel modules to honor the INSTALL_MOD_DIR Kbuild environment variable.
• Added support for R8, GR88 and YCbCr GBM formats.
• Optimized the X driver headless framerate limiter to more closely mimic upstream behavior and prevent it from activating in inconvenient situations. Added a new X config option "LimitFrameRateWhenHeadless" to disable the headless framerate limiter.
• Fixed a bug that prevented Gamescope from running when using the NVIDIAOpen GPU Kernel modules.
• Fixed a bug that prevented the installer package from being unpacked on systems where zstd is not installed, when /tmp is mounted noexec.
• Use transparent huge pages when available for the .text section. This is done through madvise() calls, and requires CONFIG_READ_ONLY_THP_FOR_FS.
• Fixed a regression that prevented setting backlight brightness levels.
• Fixed a bug that could lead to UI corruption in nvidia-installer on systems with more than one initramfs file per kernel.
• Fixed a bug that caused games built on the Source 2 engine to hangwhen running under Xwayland.
• Changed the name visible in /proc/devices of NVIDIA devices and the NVIDIA control device from "nvidia-frontend" to "nvidia" and "nvidiactl".Scripts which parse /proc/devices (such as udev rules) may need to be updated. Note that the conventional /dev device paths like /dev/nvidia0 and /dev/nvidiactl remain unchanged.

What NVIDIA listed in full for the driver including duplicates from previous driver below (full changelog):

See the driver release notes.