NVIDIA 396.18 Linux Driver Reaches Beta With New Vulkan SPIR-V Compiler

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA 396.18 Linux Driver Reaches Beta With New Vulkan SPIR-V Compiler

NVIDIA has rolled out an exciting beta Linux driver today, the first in their upcoming 396 driver series...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-396.18-Beta-Released

[shmerl]

Are they writing compiler from scratch, or it's using llvm?

[Michael]

Are they writing compiler from scratch, or it's using llvm?

They haven't released any inside details, but will be poking the driver more after my initial tests.

[davidbepo]

nice, a possible side effect would be better(or worse) dxvk support: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/wiki/Driver-support

[GizmoChicken]

The NVIDIA 396.18 driver also has a new AllowExternalGpus option that can be enabled for providing X screens to external GPUs.

Interesting. I hope that Michael has the hardware to test/benchmark this feature.

[AsuMagic]

nice, a possible side effect would be better(or worse) dxvk support: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/wiki/Driver-support

I think the crash issue is largely gone by now, at least I've not heard of it recently.
What it should really help with is reducing stuttering on DXVK, which is largely due to recompiling shaders on the fly. While it is cached on disk by the driver (pipeline caching was removed from DXVK itself for this reason), it takes a while to fill up the cache. And that works for games like Overwatch but a lot of singleplayer games in particular just periodically stutter like hell during most of the gameplay.

[Guy1524]

This fixes all the GTA V bugs on dxvk

[RealNC]

The Chrome bug making browsing so slow as to be borderline unusable has not been fixed, I guess?

[mike44]

How to install on Ubuntu 16.04? Thanks

[ga2mer]

The Chrome bug making browsing so slow as to be borderline unusable has not been fixed, I guess?

It's a Chrome bug and it fixed, wait for update or use unstable version