Transport Fever 2 is a much loved transport sim released with same-day Linux support in December 2019, and it's only going to keep getting better.

Gathering over seven thousand user reviews it has a Very Positive rating on Steam, so it's clear that this second edition from Urban Games and Good Shepherd Entertainment has hit the mark. It has a lot of features, quite a lot of content and graphically it looks pretty good too.

However, it has just like the first game suffered some performance problems. They're aware, they've done a few updates to fix parts but more is needed. What's exciting here is that they announced in a post about upcoming macOS support that Linux and Windows will be getting an upgrade with Vulkan!

We don't know exactly when it will arrive though. They mentioned the macOS version for November, so presumably sometime between now and then the Linux and Windows versions will get Vulkan support. If it's an additional option and not a whole API replacement, we might look at comparing the performance difference when the update is live.

Available on Humble Store , GOG and Steam .

NVIDIA have pushed out a fresh update to their developer-focused Vulkan Beta Driver series, here's the highlights and what's changed.

For starters it's now been rebased on top of their mainline 455 driver branch, which brings with it Ampere 30xx series support. So for anyone truly needing this series for all the brand-new Vulkan extensions and other Beta features, you should be good to go.

Other than that, here's what's changed in 455.22.04 :

• VK_EXT_global_priority support for Windows 10 with hardware scheduling enabled
• VK_EXT_shader_image_atomic_int64
• VK_KHR_copy_commands2
• Allow importing external host memory as cached
• Fixed a bug in a barrier optimization that allowed some back-to-back copies to run unordered

You can find the Vulkan Beta Driver here .

Reminder: you know it's a special Beta driver thanks to the additional two numbers on the end of the version string, with the newest stable version of the NVIDIA driver for Linux at 450.66 which released on August 18. 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. Not to be confused also with the 455.23.04 driver release that went out on September 17, which was a Beta version of their main series that released along with Ampere .

If you just want to know when a new stable driver is released, you can follow our dedicated Drivers tag .

Liftoff: FPV Drone Racing, a popular drone racer that's enjoyed by many users on Steam just recently had a massive free upgrade released.

It's been available in some form since 2015, with a full release in 2018 and still LuGus Studios continually develop it and add new features. This big 1.3 release is all about preparing it for the future with much of the underlying tech being overhauled and upgraded.

One of the reasons they did a big upgrade to the Unity game engine that powers it was a "hidden limit", which as they added new content and features over five years it ended up causes them some big problems. However, Unity in that time changed a lot and their game heavily relies on physics so it was a big overhaul job. Additionally, they optimised the game as a whole to now precisely control what it loads and when to lower the memory usage.

Some of the big highlights include:

• Engine update from version 5.6 to 2018.4.
• Major code reworks of some essential Liftoff systems to increase stability and optimize memory usage.
• Content management systems update: optimized loading and memory usage:
  - Tracks now only load those track items actually needed by the track, instead of all of them.
  - Drone setups now load faster and memory usage is optimized.
  - Race AI opponents are now generated locally instead of downloaded from the Liftoff Pro service.
• Updated physics to 4.0, as previously featured on the Experimental Branch.
  - Updated drag model to be more accurate based on the exact setup of the drone.
  - Some skins now have an impact on the drag behavior. This is visualized with an icon next to the skin in the Workbench.
  - More about what's included in Physics 4.0 and how it affects the flight behavior of your drone can be found here and here .
• Added Replay feature. Save your flights and watch them whenever you want:
  - In Free Flight and Infinite Race, after a drone reset, your flight recording can be saved in the Pause menu.
  - In Race and Freestyle, you can save your recording in the finish screen or afterwards in the Pause menu.
• Added Russian Woodpecker Night Fever environment variant (for owners of the Night Fever DLC pack).
• Updated the Minus Two environment to make it perform significantly better.
• Added third person spectator option to multiplayer.
• Added Vulkan rendering support on Linux.
• Updated the loading screen to show what's happening in the background and changed the loading background image depending on which level is being loaded.
• First/Third person camera mode is now saved and applied on every time a flight session is started.

That's just a small taste, see the full post here . What's clear here is their dedication. They have over 2.5 thousand user reviews on Steam and they clearly went to keep updating Liftoff for some time and bring in more players. Additionally, they've shown clear dedication to the Linux port too, responding in detail to any Linux issues and helping to get it sorted.

You can buy Liftoff: FPV Drone Racing on Steam .

As another win for both open standards and modern graphics APIs, the classic and continually improving open source graphics rendering engine OGRE will get Vulkan support in the upcoming 2.3 release.

Need a quick primer on what OGRE is? It's a scene-oriented, flexible 3D engine written in C++ designed to make it easier and more intuitive for developers to produce applications utilising hardware-accelerated 3D graphics. The class library abstracts all the details of using the underlying system libraries like Direct3D and OpenGL and provides an interface based on world objects and other intuitive classes.

Some time ago, back in November 2019 they announced Vulkan support had been started but it was early days for it. We got an official update on this on September 26, 2020 as their blog post announced that Vulkan support will be landing in the OGRE 2.3 release (along with Android support).

It seems like the work to support Vulkan took a lot of effort with the developer, Matias Goldberg, mentioning it being "so complex I kept getting overwhelmed".

To get anything working with Vulkan for OGRE users, some manual effort will be needed like porting shaders over and they're currently working on all the documentation for it. Vulkan support isn't entirely done yet, as the GitHub tracker shows there's a bit more left to be done but it's close.

Once OGRE 2.3 is out proper, we will let you know.

Translating Direct3D 12 to Vulkan for use with Wine makes a huge step forwards, as the Wine team have announced the release today of vkd3d 1.2.

As a refresher, this is another project like DXVK which translates Direct3D 9/10/10 to Vulkan and forms part of Steam Play's Proton compatibility layer. This vkd3d is the official one being developed by the Wine team, which was created by the late Józef Kucia who sadly died last year . Valve also have their own fork, with VKD3D-Proton .

CodeWeavers developer and Wine leader Alexandre Julliard today announced their official vkd3d 1.2 release. They listed the highlights as:

• Availability of libvkd3d-shader as a public library.
• Support for tessellation shaders.
• Version 1.1 root signatures.
• Stream output support.

The full list shows just how much work went into this release, with a lot more Direct3D 12 features features now supported including multi-sampling, reserved resources, indirect indexed draws, depth rendering without a pixel shader, depth clipping, dual-source blending and the list goes on.

New environment variables came with this release too including:

• VKD3D_CONFIG can be used to set options that change the behaviour of libvkd3d.
• VKD3D_TEST_BUG can be used to disable bug_if() conditions in the test suite.
• VKD3D_TEST_FILTER can be used to control which tests are run.
• VKD3D_VULKAN_DEVICE can be used to override the Vulkan physical device used by vkd3d.

What's also interesting in their release notes is that Windows is now a supported target platform. That can be useful for direct testing and comparisons, and like we've seen with DXVK - people do actually use that on Windows as well as it can improve performance there on certain titles.

With the news recently that Microsoft has acquired ZeniMax, who own Bethesda - so think The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Wolfenstein, DOOM, Dishonored, Quake, Starfield and more - it's going to be quite essential that we have a good Direct3D 12 to Vulkan layer ready considering Microsoft will no doubt push for more lock-in with their own Direct3D as opposed to using Vulkan.

More NVIDIA news for you today, not only is it possible to use GeForce NOW on Linux in the browser, we also have a new stable NVIDIA driver release.

The majority of the 450.66 driver is to add new GPU support for multiple Quadro and Matrox, the type of stuff used in professional settings and not really for consumers. Still, NVIDIA constantly add to their Linux support which is good.

Apart from that, there was one single listed bug fix. Small but it sounded quite important:

Fixed triple buffering support of Vulkan X11 swapchains when applications are syncing to vblank.

Since it made me curious how and when it might happen, I spoke to NVIDIA about this specific fix.

Here's what they sent along earlier about it:

This addresses the issue of applications being capped to half the display refresh rate (for example, capped to 30 FPS on a 60 Hz display) when 1) they are flipping sync'd to vblank 2) use more than two swapchain images (which is the case of DXVK) and 3) they render below the display refresh rate. If such application renders at 54 FPS on a 60 Hz display, it should now flip at 54 FPS instead of 30 FPS.

Damien Leone, NVIDIA

So that's another tick in the box for improved Vulkan, Linux and NVIDIA together.

You can see the 450.66 driver here . As this is a stable driver, you should be good to go on upgrading. Whenever your distribution offers packages that is. If you're on Arch, I've recently been shown the TkG installer and it worked great.

Do a barrel roll! Actually, now you can in Fugl, the shape-shifting bird flying sim just had another Early Access upgrade to improve their Vulkan API support and more.

Apparently being able to do a Barrel Roll has been requested for a long time, ever since the first showing of Fugl to the public. It's a nice little addition, giving you just that little bit of extra fun while you're flying around exploring. Not just that, there's a new procedural walking animation too which looks pretty sweet.

On top of new features, they're continuing to improve their use of the advanced Vulkan graphics API. This release adds in terrain culling and general Vulkan rendering optimizations. Additionally, plenty of bug fixes as well like giving all animals avatars, background blurring done correctly, a smoother underwater camera, improved level loading and so on.

Great little casual exploration and relaxation sim, wonderful to see it continue getting more impressive.

Find Fugl on Humble Store , itch.io and Steam .

After a few months since 1.7 went out, DXVK 1.7.1 is now live to further improve Direct3D to Vulkan translation. This is the project that helps to power Proton, the compatibility layer for Steam Play .

This release adds support for newer Vulkan extensions, fixes bugs and has new GPU driver requirements. On the driver side, the VK_EXT_transform_feedback extension is now required which has been supported in drivers on Linux since late 2018 / early 2019.It also pulls in support for both VK_EXT_4444_formats to help Intel and VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state to  "implement out-of-bounds vertex buffer access behaviour correctly" where drivers support them. Neither is a hard-requirement like VK_EXT_transform_feedback is.

As for game improvements, plenty more Windows games should see improvements including Anarchy Online, Metro Exodus, Observation, Resident Evil 7, Serious Sam 2, SpellForce 2, Timeshift, Trackmania, Borderlands 3, Halo, Mafia III: Definitive Edition and more. For D3D9 specifically, they also implemented some missing shader bits to fix shadow rendering "in a number of games".

You should also find that GeForce Now works when used with DXVK, although from what I've seen there's plenty of other issues elsewhere with running GFN in Wine. You can find the full release notes here .

As a reminder: it's possible to update your Steam Play Proton install with this newer DXVK release, without waiting on a new Proton build. To do so you can just overwrite the existing DXVK files with the release download of DXVK 1.7.1. You can find your Proton install somewhere like this (depending on your Steam Library drives):

path-to-your/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/Proton x.x/dist

Where x.x is whatever Proton version installed you wish to give a new DXVK.

Inside there you will see "lib" and "lib64", for 32bit and 64bit. Inside each of those, there's a "wine" folder and inside there is a "dxvk" folder and that's where you replace the files with new versions. Do so at your own risk but it's usually harmless. If you mess anything up, to refresh it you can usually just re-install Proton from the Tools menu in Steam.

Shortly after giving us a brand new stable mainline driver, the NVIDIA driver team have released a new developer-focused Vulkan Beta Driver.

A big change here is that the driver has been rebased onto the newer r450 series, bringing with it numerous other bug fixes and improvements there in past driver released. As for what's new to the 450.56.01 Vulkan Beta:

Features:

• Added support for the VkPhysicalDeviceRayTracingFeaturesKHR.rayTracingIndirectTraceRays ray tracing feature
• VK_NV_device_diagnostics_config

Fixes:

• Make the pSizes parameters of vkCmdBindVertexBuffers2EXT be relative to the pBuffers+pOffsets
• Fixed potential crash in the first vkQueuePresentKHR() call after creating a new VkSwapchainKHR with a non-NULL oldSwapchain
• Fixed potential crash in vkCmdBeginRenderPass() when using VK_EXT_sample_locations

Reminder: you know it's a special Beta driver thanks to the additional two numbers on the end of the version string, with the newest stable version of the NVIDIA driver for Linux at 450.57 which released on July 9 . 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.