NVIDIA 435.17 Linux Beta Driver Adds Vulkan + OpenGL PRIME Render Offload

NVIDIA this morning introduced their 435 Linux driver series currently in beta form with the release of the 435.17 Linux build. With this new driver comes finally the best PRIME/multi-GPU support they have presented to date.

The NVIDIA 435.17 driver has a new PRIME render offload implementation supported for Vulkan and OpenGL (with GLX). This PRIME offloading is about using one GPU for display but having the actual rendering be done on a secondary GPU, as is common with many of today's high-end notebooks that have Intel integrated graphics paired with a discrete NVIDIA GPU.

For the NVIDIA PRIME render offload support, they require some recent commits to the X.Org Server that sadly isn't in any released version but will be there for the eventual xorg-server 1.21 release. In the meantime, NVIDIA is providing an Ubuntu PPA with a patched X.Org Server build.

This offload support also requires some fiddling to the xorg.conf configuration and environment variables for activation, but after that should be much better PRIME support than the previous options.

The NVIDIA 435.17 Linux driver also has experimental support for run-time D3 power management for Turing notebook GPUs, a variety of bug fixes, support for changing the Digital Vibrance on Turing hardware, and drops non-GLVND OpenGL support.

More details on the NVIDIA 435.17 Linux beta driver via the NVIDIA DevTalk.