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=1kernel 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):
Full changelog, click to open
- 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 hang when running under Xwayland.
- Added experimental HDMI 10 bits per component support; enable by loading nvidia-modeset with `hdmi_deepcolor=1`.
- Added support for HDR signaling via the HDR_OUTPUT_METADATA and Colorspace per-connector DRM properties when nvidia-drm is loaded with the`modeset=1` parameter.
- Added support for PRIME render offload to Vulkan Wayland WSI.
- Added support for the CTM, DEGAMMA_LUT, and GAMMA_LUT DRM-KMS CRTCproperties. These are used by features such as the "Night Light"feature in GNOME and the "Night Color" feature in KDE, when they are used as Wayland compositors.
- Added beta-quality support for GeForce and Workstation GPUs to open kernel modules. Please see the "Open Linux Kernel Modules" chapter in the README for details.
- Added initial experimental support for runtime D3 (RTD3) power management on Desktop GPUs. Please see the 'PCI-Express Runtime D3 (RTD3) Power Management' chapter in the README for more details.
- Added support for the EGL_ANDROID_native_fence_sync EGL extension and the VK_EXTERNAL_SEMAPHORE_HANDLE_TYPE_SYNC_FD_BIT andVK_EXTERNAL_FENCE_HANDLE_TYPE_SYNC_FD_BIT Vulkan external handle typeswhen the nvidia-drm kernel module is loaded with the modeset=1 parameter.
- Added experimental support for framebuffer consoles provided by nvidia-drm. On kernels that implement drm_fbdev_generic_setup anddrm_aperture_remove_conflicting_pci_framebuffers, nvidia-drm will install a framebuffer console when loaded with both `modeset=1` and `fbdev=1`kernel module parameters. This will replace the Linux boot console drivenby a system framebuffer driver such as efifb or vesafb.
Note that when an nvidia-drm framebuffer console is enabled, unloading nvidia-drm will cause the screen to turn off.
- Updated nvidia-installer to allow installing the driver while an existing NVIDIA driver is already loaded.
- Added support for virtual reality displays, such as the SteamVR platform,on Wayland compositors that support DRM leasing. Support requires xwayland version 22.1.0 and wayland-protocols version 1.22, or later.Tested on sway, minimum version 1.7 with wlroots version 0.15, and also on Kwin, minimum version 5.24.
Note: Before xwayland 23.2, there is a known issue with HDMI displays where the headset will fail to start a second time after closing SteamVR. This can be worked around by unplugging and replugging in the headset.
- Fixed a bug that prevented VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) from working with Wayland.
- 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/nvidia0and /dev/nvidiactl remain unchanged.
- Added support to the NVIDIA VDPAU driver for running in Xwayland. Please refer to the "Xwayland support in VDPAU" section of the README for further details.
- Added libnvidia-gpucomp.so to the driver package. This is a helper library used for GPU shader compilation.
- Removed libnvidia-vulkan-producer.so from the driver package. This helper library is no longer needed by the Wayland WSI.
See the driver release notes.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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pleasereadthemanual Jan 24
Holding out hope this is the one that fixes XWayland flickering...it didn't happen before 545, so I feel like this isn't related to implicit sync, but I don't have a clue.
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TactikalKitty Jan 25
Hopefully this fixes the KDE freezing issue upon re login from sleep. This was a big problem for me with Driver 545 and Kernel 6.15. I'll probably install OpenSuse again if so. Moved to PoP OS for now.
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Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition has been fixed with this drivers
Steam launch:
VKD3D_FEATURE_LEVEL=12_2 VKD3D_CONFIG=dxr11 PROTON_HIDE_NVIDIA_GPU=0 PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1 gamemoderun %command% -deependark -forcenohdr %command%
Steam launch:
VKD3D_FEATURE_LEVEL=12_2 VKD3D_CONFIG=dxr11 PROTON_HIDE_NVIDIA_GPU=0 PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1 gamemoderun %command% -deependark -forcenohdr %command%
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That desktop frameate fix is going to be nice...
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RyanHakurei Feb 1
QuoteAdded beta-quality support for GeForce and Workstation GPUs to open kernel modules. Please see the "Open Linux Kernel Modules" chapter in the README for details.
This was actually part of the 545 release.
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RyanHakurei Feb 4
Quoting: wolfyrionMetro Exodus Enhanced Edition has been fixed with this drivers
Steam launch:
VKD3D_FEATURE_LEVEL=12_2 VKD3D_CONFIG=dxr11 PROTON_HIDE_NVIDIA_GPU=0 PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1 gamemoderun %command% -deependark -forcenohdr %command%
You sure? Still borked for me. First prompts that it failed and asks for safe mode, then crashes either way. I think this game is just perma-borked for Nvidia users.
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