NVIDIA 450.51 Linux Driver Beta Adds NGX Library, PRIME Improvements

Earlier this month a NVIDIA 450 Linux beta driver popped out as part of the CUDA 11.0 release candidate. Today though is the first public and generally available NVIDIA 450 series Linux driver beta for all users.

With today's NVIDIA 450.51 Linux beta driver there are many new features and fixes. Among the changes with the NVIDIA 450.51 Linux driver are:

- Support for NVIDIA NGX as a new library for the DLSS SDK and NGX SDK. NGX is the NVIDIA library for pre-built AI-based features. To date it's been focused on CUDA and DirectX 11/12 but now with it coming to Linux presumably Vulkan support is being worked on. NVIDIA RTX GPUs are required. DLSS is the Deep Learning Super Sampling functionality used by some (Windows) games.

- A fix for the KDE Plasma session crashing under Wayland. Separately there is also a fix where the Plasma desktop panel could freeze when compositing is disabled.

- Better Vulkan device enumeration when running on the X.Org Server. Also many other Vulkan fixes.

- Dynamic runtime power management now supports powering off the video memory under certain conditions as part of PCIe Runtime D3 handling.

- HEVC 10/12-bit decode-only support for NVIDIA VDPAU.

- Support for 16-bit surfaces with NVIDIA VDPAU.

- Support for image sharpening for OpenGL and Vulkan software.

- Support for Vulkan direct-to-display on DP MST (Multi-Stream Transport) display setups.

- Support for PRIME Synchronization when the xf86-video-amdgpu DDX is the PRIME display offload sink. There are also other PRIME handling improvements.

Downloads and full change-log via NVIDIA.com.