Need to be on the bleeding edge of what NVIDIA have to offer? They just released driver version 455.50.03, as part of their Vulkan Beta Driver series . This is actually the second driver released this month, with 455.50.02 appearing on January 19. Here's a look over all that's new in them together.

Today's 455.50.03 release adds in support for these new Vulkan extensions:

• VK_KHR_workgroup_memory_explicit_layout
  • This extension adds Vulkan support for the SPV_KHR_workgroup_memory_explicit_layout SPIR-V extension, which allows shaders to explicitly define the layout of Workgroup storage class memory and create aliases between variables from that storage class in a compute shader.
• VK_KHR_zero_initialize_workgroup_memory

  • This extension allows the use of a null constant initializer on shader Workgroup memory variables, allowing implementations to expose any special hardware or instructions they may have. Zero initialization is commonly used by applications running untrusted content (e.g. web browsers) as way of defeating memory-scraping attacks.

The January 19 release with 455.50.02 added support for linear images in host-visible video memory, had two Windows bug fixes and one for Linux to fix "an issue with OpenGL where imported Vulkan buffers would fail with GL_OUT_OF_MEMORY when marked as resident".

Reminder: This special Vulkan beta driver is where all the shiny new stuff goes in before making its way into the stable release for everyone. Really, it's mostly aimed at developers and serious enthusiasts. Unless you need what's in them, it's generally best to use the stable drivers.

The newest stable versions of the main NVIDIA driver for Linux are at 460.32.03 released on January 7, 2021 from their "Production Branch" series or 455.45.01 released on October 17, 2020 from their "New Feature" series. Confused?