NVIDIA Releases Updated Vulkan Driver

[bridgman]

Ahh, I understand.

That work on option (a) had actually started well before we met with Michael, as had investigation into alternatives. We just weren't at the point where we could say "this is for-sure the direction that we are taking to market". We still aren't quite there, but we are a lot closer.

[Kano]

Kepler is still used in the Shield K1, so Nvidia needs to implement Vulkan for it. I don't know what's the problem with Fermi, but as Vulkan is like a speed path to the GFX pipeline the chip should support it as natively as possible. If there are too many parts emulated it seems to be useless.

[vsteel]

So I am getting a little confused. I am currently running the 361.xx driver, does that mean that only the 355.xx series got the update because it is a development branch? Does Nvidia have a development branch and a release branch?

[Kano]

Those 2 drivers are only different in 1 file. The 355 series adds one file to /etc/vulkan/icd.d .

[xpue]

Those 2 drivers are only different in 1 file

Not true. Vulkan library is libGL.so:

$ cat NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-355.00.26/nvidia_icd.json
{
    "file_format_version" : "1.0.0",
    "ICD": {
        "library_path": "libGL.so.1",
        "api_version" : "1.0.3"
    }
}

Here's our vulkan entry point:

$ nm -D NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-355.00.26/libGL.so.355.00.26 |grep -E '\bT\s+vk'
00000000000a1e80 T vk_icdGetInstanceProcAddr

However no such thing in 361.*

$ nm -D NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-361.28/libGL.so.1.0.0 |grep -E '\bT\s+vk'
<empty>
$ nm -D NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-361.28/libGL.so.361.28 |grep -E '\bT\s+vk'
<empty>

[Kano]

Did I say something else? If the driver ships the ICD file it has Vulkan support, otherwise not!

[xpue]

Did I say something else? If the driver ships the ICD file it has Vulkan support, otherwise not!

You said "Those 2 drivers are only different in 1 file", that implies something completely different.