After releasing upgrading their stable drivers with version 460.80 following the release of the the RTX 3050 and RTX 3050 Ti for laptops - a new Vulkan Beta Driver is out now.

Vulkan Beta 455.50.19 is a pretty small one, here's what's changed:

• New:
  • VK_EXT_provoking_vertex
• Fixes:
  • Added support for Vulkan provisional video session picture parameters objects

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 460.80 released on May 11, 2021 from their "Production Branch" series or 465.27 released on April 29, 2020 from their "New Feature" series. Confused? It's a lot of numbers to remember but both Production and New Feature series are fine for normal use.

Note: you should probably make sure your drivers are up to date, especially after the recent security issues .

See the driver page for more .

Not a big fan of permadeath? Good news for you as Caves of Qud, the awesome science fantasy roguelike epic, now has new game modes in Beta.

While the traditional and normal mode of the game remains as permanent death, the current opt-in Beta on Steam now has new options available which should help people explore its truly wonderful and bizarre world. Here's the modes it has now:

• Classic - nothing changes.
• Roleplay - checkpoints and settlements enabling you to reload when you die from the last one.
• Wander - checkpoints at settlements, most creatures start neutral to you, no XP for kills, more XP for discoveries, completing quests, and performing the water ritual.

Never played Qud? Here's just some of what to expect from it:

• Assemble your character from over 70 mutations and defects and 24 castes and kits—outfit yourself with wings, two heads, quills, four arms, flaming hands, or the power to clone yourself—it's all the character diversity you could want.
• Explore procedurally-generated regions with some familiar locations—each world is nearly 1 million maps large.

• Dig through everything—don't like the wall blocking your way? Dig through it with a pickaxe, or eat through it with your corrosive gas mutation, or melt it to lava. Yes, every wall has a melting point.
• Hack the limbs off monsters—every monster and NPC is as fully simulated as the player. That means they have levels, skills, equipment, faction allegiances, and body parts. So if you have a mutation that lets you, say, psionically dominate a spider, you can traipse through the world as a spider, laying webs and eating things.
• Pursue allegiances with over 60 factions—apes, crabs, robots, and highly entropic beings—just to name a few.
• Follow the plot to Barathrum the Old, a sentient cave bear who leads a sect of tinkers intent on restoring technological splendor to Qud.

It is absolutely one of the wildest roguelikes I've ever played. What other game can you claim to be a mutated human with a beak that generates corrosive gas? While also having horns, multiple legs and you're cold blooded? Not many other games I bet, probably not any in fact. Caves of Qud is just brilliant.

You can grab a copy now from GOG , itch.io and Steam .

The Invisible Hand is a first-person stockbroker experience where you try and get rich quick, while you work for the trading firm FERIOS. Your only job is to make money and as much as possible.

Just like the real thing you will buy when they're going up, sell before you make a big loss and make as much commission as possible. Of course, it's not that simple. This is, after all, a game. You can find ways to make things easier, like lobbying an influential group to affect the market or even drive down an entire currency to boost your margins. It's a cut-throat world out there.

Watch video on YouTube.com

Developed by Power Struggle Games, a French game development collective cheekily intent on dismantling Capitalism from the inside, through games and they say they're "unabashedly political".

On Steam, the developer mentioned a Linux build has now been provided and they're looking for feedback on it.

Check it out on Steam .

Ready for another huge Steam Festival? It shall be returning with the Steam Game Festival, February 2021 edition. Plus there's a fresh Steam Beta that Linux users will want to try out.

For the Steam Game Festival it goes live on February 3 at 10AM PT / 6PM UTC. Much like the previous festivals, it's all about giving developers a chance to showcase their upcoming games. There's going to be tons of demos across various genres for you to try, plus there will also be livestreams where developers will talk about various topics surrounding their games from development to live gameplay.

Watch video on YouTube.com

As usual, we shall be going over to find all the Linux demos worth taking a look at so be sure to come back to GamingOnLinux on February 3 to see what we liked.

You can follow the event page here .

Now onto something related: there's a fresh Steam Client Beta available as of January 30 which polishes up the shader cache and processing system on Steam. This is the feature that is supposed to make games smoother, so it's worth giving it another go. Here's the changelog :

• Fixed a bug where processing Vulkan shaders would run out of memory on NVIDIA Pascal cards and older
• Re-enabled Vulkan shader processing on NVIDIA
• Fixed a bug where NVIDIA shader cache files above 2GB couldn't be loaded
• Greatly improved memory usage and disk I/O when processing NVIDIA cache files (requires driver 460.x or newer)
• Updated to latest Fossilize, picking up some general memory usage improvements

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?

Plasma, the desktop environment from the KDE team has a big new upgrade coming with the release of Plasma 5.21 Beta and it's looking to be a thing of beauty.

Their current aim with Plasma 5.21 is to finely polish the experience overall, with the KDE team saying it pulls in "many improvements into Plasma’s design, utilities and themes, with the aim of providing end users with a more pleasant and accessible environment".

Plasma 5.21 will bring with it a redesigned application launcher, theme improvements, a brand new UI for the Plasma System Monitor, Plasma Firewall settings added to the overall system settings to let you configure both UFW and firewalld, plenty of UI cleaning done on system settings and much more.

It's big in many areas, not just design tweaks, with a big plan in progress to have KDE push for first-class Wayland support with KWin. They say that Plasma 5.21 "makes great headway to reach that goal". KWin, the compositor, has been "extensively refactored" and so you should see reduced latency throughout the entire stack.

Also available are mixed refresh rate setups with Wayland and Plasma 5.21. So now you can have one set at 144HZ and another at 60Hz and things won't bug out on you, and they say that early support for "multiple GPUs was also added on Wayland". Other Wayland interactions got improved too like virtual keyboard supporting GTK apps, along with many other Plasma components and KDE apps being more ready for Wayland.

Love a mix of dark and light themes? They have you covered there too with the introduction of Breeze Twilight as an official theme. It will give a dark theme for Plasma directly while mixing in light styles for applications. I must admit, it does look pretty good in they shot they showed off:

See the release announcement here .

Getting real close to release now is the huge 2.6 upgrade for the Beamdog classic RPGs now including Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition, Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition, Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear and Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition.

They've gradually moved from one game to the next, opening up an opt-in Beta you can try for each right now on Steam. Each of them needing some feedback to ensure you can properly play it including double-checking the save system is working correctly.

2.6 is a big upgrade for Beamdog's enhanced version of the Infinity Engine and while it won't solve every last issue in each of the noted games, it's still a needed update for them all.

Want to get involved? They need Linux testing too (the Beta is Steam only, other stores when ready). We've reported on the Baldur's Gate Beta testing before but now  Icewind Dale is included and the Baldur's Gate titles also got fresh updates. See the links below for each for more info:

- Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition
- Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear
- Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition
- Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition

You can see the full changelist here . Some highlights for all include:

• Changed to 64 bit executables; 32 bit operating systems are no longer supported
• Hundreds of bug fixes including many spell fixes
• Improved pathfinding
• Improved multiplayer stability
• Added Adventurers of Neverwinter content to all games
• Added French, Italian, German, Ukrainian and Polish text localizations to Siege of Dragonspear
• Added French text localization to Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition
• Added Brazilian Portuguese and Chinese (Simplified) text localizations to Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition

Need to buy a copy? Links below:

- Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition - GOG / Steam
- Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear - GOG / Steam
- Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition - GOG / Steam
- Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition - GOG / Steam

While work continues on the sequel, Axiom Verge has a first ever free content update following the release back in 2015 with a new Randomizer Mode. Never played Axiom Verge? You're missing out. A true love-letter to the classic metroidvanias!

This brand new update is currently in Beta, requiring you on Steam to opt into it in the usual way. Right click the game, go to Properties and hit Betas on the left panel and find it there. As the name of the update might suggest, it makes things a bit more random but "in a very sophisticated way". This mode is smart enough so you won't get stuck because of needing a certain item to progress onwards.

How did it come about so long after release? Thanks to the speedrunning community, along with a developer of a mod that gave players an unofficial version of this but it needed a copy of the game. They teamed up to add it into the base game with the modder refusing any compensation for it. How nice for all of us!

There's a few different modes of play for the randomizer, as the developer explained:

• "Beginner progression mode is really a bit of a misnomer. The Randomizer itself is for people who have beaten the game, ideally multiple times, and have explored the map very thoroughly. Beginner mode assumes that you will be playing through the game in much the same way that anyone would progress through it. For what it’s worth, this is the mode I play."
• "Advanced mode assumes that you’ll play through the game the way a speedrunner familiar with exploiting certain glitches may go through it. There are ways to skip the entire grapple hook area, for example, if you know how. Because the system knows what you expect to be able to get at which areas, it can make sure to accommodate this route."
• "Masochist mode is similar to Advanced mode, except that it assumes you’ll be doing a low % speedrun. As of right now, there are exactly 4 people in the world able to play this mode. If you don’t know that you’re one of them, you’re probably not. This progression mode is included primarily because the aforementioned people who developed this mode include those masochists in question."

See the full details of the new mode here .

Initially the Beta update broke on Linux but thanks to a quick fix from FNA developer and Linux game porter Ethan Lee (who is not involved in this game directly), the developer pulled in the fix to ensure the Linux version is good to go.

You can buy it from Humble Store and Steam .

Watch video on YouTube.com

Free, open source and actually really good - Widelands was originally inspired by The Settlers II and they've confirmed their plans for a big release this year.

Back in July 2020, Widelands Build 21 went out which pulled in lots of big improvements and made it much more worthwhile spending time with. After that, the team working on it continued hacking away and in the latest announcement it was a "golden time for development, with numerous new features added and swarms of bugs fixed" and so "the era of the Widelands beta build releases has come to an end, and the first-ever stable release Widelands 1.0 will be released this summer".

To ensure the Widelands 1.0 release is good to go they will enter Feature Freeze in March, which means no new features will enter the code to ensure they can then focus on fixing up bugs.

I remember spending absolutely tons of hours playing the original Settlers on an Amiga, and much later Settlers II on a PC. Widelands brings back plenty of good gaming memories and it's a really relaxing game to play through, as you build up and expand your settlement across the map. Multiple game modes to suit different players, including endless and peaceful modes if you wish to just keep building with no interruptions.

See more on the Widelands website . You can find downloads here .