NVIDIA 415.22.05 Driver Taps New Vulkan Extensions, Better Pipeline Creation Performance

Just ahead of NVIDIA's expected reveal of new hardware at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), their driver teams have done a Sunday morning drop of new Vulkan beta drivers that match the new functionality offered up by Vulkan 1.1.97.

The NVIDIA 415.22.05 Linux beta driver adds support for the VK_EXT_memory_budget and VK_EXT_buffer_device_address extensions introduced with today's Vulkan 1.1.97 specification update. But the VK_EXT_memory_priority extension for now is Windows-only. The driver also has VK_KHR_depth_stencil_resolve too but not yet the LunarG-guided VK_EXT_validation_features extension also introduced by today's first Vulkan spec update of 2019.

Today's NVIDIA Vulkan updates also restores support for VK_EXT_pci_bus_info after that extension was fixed up in last month's Vulkan 1.1.96 revision after originally it incorrectly assumed PCI domains to be 16-bit rather than 32-bit.

Last but certainly not least, besides the Vulkan extension fun, the new NVIDIA beta drivers offer better pipeline creation performance when there is a cache hit. The NVIDIA 415.22.05 Linux beta driver as well as the Windows 417.63 driver are available from developer.nvidia.com.