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 .

Here's a short and sweet update on the work for Zink, the upcoming OpenGL on top of Vulkan implementation announced by Collabora which has been progressing steadily.

As a quick refresher: Zink is a Mesa Gallium driver that leverages the existing OpenGL implementation in Mesa to provide hardware accelerated OpenGL when only a Vulkan driver is available. More on the why can be found here .

Developer Mike Blumenkrantz has been hacking away at Zink code lately, after announcing back in November 2020 that Valve jumped in to fund more work on it. In a fresh blog post is up where Blumenkrantz mentions the continued sponsorship from Valve, and as a result Zink can now run with NVIDIA GPUs on Linux with the wording "So now zink+nvidia is a thing.". See it in action below:

Once it's ready, it's going to be extremely interesting to see what becomes of it.

Interested in keeping up with the Vulkan driver development on the Raspberry Pi 4? We have a new update for you and an upcoming event you might want to watch.

While the v3dv driver is now part of Mesa and was released along with Mesa 20.3.0 back in December 2020, work has not stopped on it. There was still plenty of areas it could improve upon from features to performance, with developer Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias writing on their blog about recent work.

Some of what's new includes:

• The following optional 1.0 features were enabled: logicOp, althaToOne, independentBlend, drawIndirectFirstInstance, and shaderStorageImageExtendedFormats.
• Added support for timestamp queries.
• Added implementation for VK_KHR_maintenance1, VK_EXT_private_data, and VK_KHR_display extensions
• Added support for Wayland WSI.

Interestingly it seems more developers are getting involved, as multiple features were hooked up by people not involved in the "core" team of the driver. Now it's in Mesa directly, anyone can get involved.

The driver itself became a conformant Vulkan driver last year but they still had more testing to do to find bugs. As part of this the Order Independent Transparency demo from Sascha Willems is now working too (see Willem's Vulkan stuff here ):

Additionally the FOSDEM 21 event in this weekend and they will be doing a talk on Saturday February 6  at 3PM UTC. The talk will cover the development story and current status of the driver, along with an overview of the design and the challenges of doing it.

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?

On Linux with AMD GPUs you can decide between the RADV and AMDVLK drivers for Vulkan API support, and it appears AMD want to make things a little easier for you.

It can get a little confusing so here's the real basics: AMDVLK is the "official" external Vulkan driver developed by AMD, whereas RADV is part of Mesa and comes with most distributions by default. Sometimes certain games work better on one, sometimes on the other. Additionally, AMD only directly support Ubuntu and Red Hat, whereas Mesa with RADV focuses on everything they can.

With the latest AMDVLK 2021.Q1.1 release, AMD has made switching between the two a little easier. With this driver installed, you only need to set an environment variable to tell whatever game or application you're using what driver to use with "AMD_VULKAN_ICD" set to either "AMDVLK" or "RADV". The default is AMDVLK of course, if none is set.

Here's the highlights of this new driver release:

New feature and improvement

• Add AMD switchable graphics layer to switch AMD Vulkan driver between amdvlk and RADV
• Update Khronos Vulkan Headers to 1.2.164
• Navi21 performance tuning for game X-Plane, Madmax, Talos Principle, Rise of Tomb Raider, F12017

Issue fix

• RPCS3 Corruption observed on Game window on Navi10

See more on GitHub .

Now that The Khronos Group has released the official Vulkan Ray Tracing API , which NVIDIA got in early it's all a bit more official with the NVIDIA 460.32.03 stable driver release.

Following on from their 460.27.04 Beta release back in December it's mostly the same. It's also now following their new driver naming scheme as we picked up before . On top of their dedicated developer-focused Vulkan / OpenGL drivers, they have their stable drivers like this which are now split between a "Production Branch" and a "New Feature Branch" with this 460.32.03 release being in the Production Branch ( listed here ).

The biggest thing is that this is a stable driver that supports the new cross-vendor Vulkan Ray Tracing API through these supported extensions:

• VK_KHR_acceleration_structure
• VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline
• VK_KHR_ray_query
• VK_KHR_pipeline_library
• VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations

On top of that this driver also adds support for these extensions:

• VK_NV_fragment_shading_rate_enums
• VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate
• VK_KHR_shader_terminate_invocation
• VK_EXT_shader_image_atomic_int64
• VK_KHR_copy_commands2

They improved their memory allocation strategy in nvidia-modeset.ko to reduce the likelihood of out-of-memory errors, plus support for RandR rotation and reflection while using an NVIDIA-driven display as a PRIME Display Offload sink and also support for "Reverse PRIME Bypass", an optimization that bypasses the bandwidth overhead of PRIME Render Offload and PRIME Display Offload in conditions where a render offload application is fullscreen, unredirected, and visible only on a given NVIDIA-driven PRIME Display Offload output.

For gamers, you will be pleased to know NVIDIA took on plenty of feedback and increased the OpenGL + Vulkan shader disk cache size to 1024MB and they gave it a new location. Lots more new, you can see the full changelog here .

If you missed the earlier news, NVIDIA are also preparing to support hardware accelerated XWayland .

NVIDIA have released a small and sweet update to their developer focused Vulkan Beta driver series with 455.46.04 out now for Linux.

Here's the changelog:

• New:
  • VK_NV_acquire_winrt_display [Windows]
• Fixes:
  • Fixed a crash from vkCreateGraphicsPipelines when certain blend operations were used with scalar outputs from the fragment shader
  • Fixed the X driver's composition pipeline (used, e.g., for X desktop rotation, "ForceCompositionPipeline", and some OpenGL Swap Group configurations) to correctly preserve color precision in depth 30 [Linux]

You can find the NVIDIA Vulkan Beta Driver here .

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 mainline drivers (either stable or beta).

Just recently, NVIDIA actually changed how they describe all their driver releases too which should make things a bit less confusing. Previously you had this Vulkan developer beta, then their mainline drivers had a "long lived" series and then a "short lived" series. The difference of which NVIDIA explained before as:

Any given release branch is either long-lived or short-lived. The difference is in how long the branch is maintained and how many releases are made from each branch. A short-lived branch typically has only one or two (non-beta) releases, while long-lived branches will have several.
[…]
When we make changes to the driver, we evaluate the oldest branch the change needs to go into. New features go into whatever the latest branch is, while bug fixes go into the older branches and are integrated through the newer branches. So using a short-lived branch doesn’t mean that you miss out on fixes, it just means that you also get the latest features.

They've now moved to calling the different branches as "Production Branch" and "New Feature Branch" (shown here ), so the meaning on each is at least a lot more clear now. The latest Production Branch level driver is at 450.80.02 from September 30 and then the New Feature Branch at 455.45.01 from November 17.

On top of that, there's also the very latest on their mainline drivers with the Beta release 460.27.04 from December 15.

Want to test out another Linux game that uses the Vulkan API? Prepare to lose a lot of your free time with Transport Fever 2 as they've just enabled it.

Urban Games and Good Shepherd Entertainment have been working to try and improve the overall performance of the game, on top of adding in macOS support too. The latest Beta is now available which adds in: Vulkan support with a switch available in the UI for OpenGL and Vulkan, there's a new cable-stayed bridge type, a library fix for Linux and more.

It's still quite early and there's plenty of issues but they're continuing to upgrade the foundation, and their game engine to support further updates to Transport Fever 2. You can find more info on the dedicated Steam Group they setup especially to gather feedback on the testing.

Considering how nicely reviewed it is by users, you can't really go wrong picking it up. Overall on Steam for example it has a Very Positive user rating and the more recent reviews even give it a higher Overwhelmingly Positive rating so it seems Urban Games have done well. See the likes of Vulkan in it is quite exciting too.

Lots of features already included too:

• Free play with countless configuration possibilities
• Three campaigns across three continents with over 20 hours of playing time
• Editors for creating maps and editing saved games
• Three landscape types: moderate, dry, and tropical
• Realistically modelled vehicles from Europe, America and Asia
• A total of over 200 vehicles: trains, buses, streetcars, trucks, aircraft and ships
• Modular train stations, bus and truck stations, airports and harbors
• Realistic transport simulation including one-way streets and light signals
• Editable and paintable terrain with realistic effects
• Intuitive construction tools for building railroads and more
• + plenty more and modding support

You can buy it on Humble Store , GOG and Steam .

Today along with upgrading Quake II RTX, NVIDIA had another surprise with the release of the new 460.27.04 Beta driver with quite a number of changes. On top of that, there's also a big new release of the LunarG Vulkan SDK for Ray Tracing.

Firstly, the driver update. Version 460.27.04 is out now, tagged as a Beta release of their mainline drivers. This new driver adds support for these extensions:

• VK_KHR_acceleration_structure extension.
• VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline extension.
• VK_KHR_ray_query extension.
• VK_KHR_pipeline_library extension.
• VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations extension.
• VK_NV_fragment_shading_rate_enums
• VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate
• VK_KHR_shader_terminate_invocation
• VK_EXT_shader_image_atomic_int64
• VK_KHR_copy_commands2

That's not all. The driver release itself also brings with it bug fixes and numerous improvements for Linux users including support for RandR rotation and reflection while using an NVIDIA-driven display as a PRIME Display Offload sink and "Reverse PRIME Bypass" which is "an optimization that bypasses the bandwidth overhead of PRIME Render Offload and PRIME Display Offload in conditions where a render offload application is fullscreen, unredirected, and visible only on a given NVIDIA-driven PRIME Display Offload output".

With OpenGL and Vulkan the shader disk cache also saw some upgrades this time around too. The location was moved, and the default size has bumped up to 1024MB, although they mentioned that caches with paths containing "/.nv/ will continue to use the previous default of 128MB "unless the size is manually overridden".

See the full driver notes here .

As for the Vulkan Software Development Kit (SDK), The Khronos Group announced today that LunarG have put out a big upgrade to the SDK with full support for the new Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions, including Validation Layers and integration of upgraded GLSL, HLSL and SPIR-V shader tool chains. With this out, plus the new drivers, the pickup of Ray Tracing might start to increase.

"Shipping API specifications was just the first step in building the developer ecosystem for Vulkan Ray Tracing, we now have tools and samples to truly enable developers to tap into the power of cross-platform ray tracing acceleration," said Daniel Koch, senior graphics system software engineer at NVIDIA and Vulkan Ray Tracing TSG chair at Khronos. "One of the key requests from the developer community was the ability to easily bring DirectX 12 ray tracing (DXR) code to Vulkan. We have achieved that through delivering a carefully designed superset of DXR, and integrating Vulkan Ray Tracing support in the DXC open source HLSL compiler."

The press release also mentions that through "the design of Vulkan Ray Tracing, projects such as vkd3d-Proton will be able to efficiently support layered DXR over Vulkan".