NVIDIA 418.30 Linux Driver Adds Video Codec SDK 9.0, Optical Flow Support

While the initial "G-SYNC Compatible" (FreeSync) support is the big headlining feature of today's NVIDIA 418.30 Linux beta driver drop, there are also other changes to get excited about too.

The G-SYNC Compatible / FreeSync feature is likely most exciting to a majority of NVIDIA Linux users, but there is also other work to find in this new beta driver series. Now that the release notes are available, here is a look at some of the other new material:

- NVIDIA Video Codec SDK 9.0 support with Turing NVENC/NVDEC video encode/decode support, support for YUV 4:4:4 decoding for H.265/HEVC on Turing, and the ability to feed a Vulkan image to NVENC using Vulkan-CUDA interop support.

- NVIDIA Optical Flow support as a new library (libnvidia-opticalflow.so) for hardware-accelerated computations of optical flow vectors and stereo disparity values. NVIDIA will be releasing an Optical Flow SDK later this quarter.

- Support for Stereo presentation in Vulkan.

- OpenGL application crash fix after repeated VT switches.

More details on the new NVIDIA 418.30 Linux driver via NVIDIA.com.

Update: Initial G-SYNC Compatible Linux testing.