NVIDIA 450 Linux Beta Driver Quietly Rolls Out With New PRIME Option, Other Improvements

NVIDIA has yet to formally announce the 450 Linux driver series in beta or stable form, but the first pre-release builds in the 450 branch did manage to creep out this past week alongside the CUDA 11.0 release candidate.

Via developer.nvidia.com when going through the CUDA download process, the NVIDIA 450.36.06 Linux driver is served up for the Ubuntu 18.04 support. If navigating the conventional NVIDIA Linux driver download process, the 440 driver series is still marked as the latest.

Coming with the NVIDIA 450 Linux driver series besides CUDA 11.0 RC compatibility are:

- Support for the Ampere A100-PG509-200 and A100-SXM4-40GB support.

- Support in the dynamic run-time power management code for being able to shut off power to the video memory in certain conditions as part of PCIe RTD3 handling.

- HEVC 10/12-bit "decode only" support has been added to the VDPAU driver.

- Support for image sharpening for OpenGL and Vulkan applications.

- New 16-bit format support within the NVIDIA VDPAU driver and with that support for creating 16-bit video surfaces in the VDPAU driver.

- The NVIDIA driver makes use now of the libtirpc IPC library in place of glibc RPC for communication with nvidia-persistencd and libnvidia-ml/NVML.

- Enabling GPU screens by default on X.Org Server 1.20.7+.

- This build does add a "AllowPRIMEDisplayOffloadSink" option for PRIME display offlink sink as another step forward in their PRIME render offload capabilities.

- Various Vulkan and X11 bug fixes.

In the days ahead we will likely be hearing more about the NVIDIA 450 Linux driver beta.