NVIDIA 470 Linux Driver Series To Be "Even More Wayland-Friendly"

The next major NVIDIA driver series, the 470 release series, is slated to be "even more Wayland-friendly" but what all that encompasses remains to be seen.

NVIDIA engineers already had confirmed that the DMA-BUF passing support will be in place for this major driver series. The NVIDIA DMA-BUF passing support is long overdue and should improve their Wayland compositor support will be part of the R470 driver series. This goes along nicely with NVIDIA working on proper XWayland support.

Sparking hope that there could even be more Wayland related work tucked into the NVIDIA 470 driver series, Canonical's Daniel van Vugt who is known for all his upstream GNOME desktop work provided an interesting remark this week:

the main reason not to use Wayland on NVIDIA is that it doesn’t support hardware acceleration of X11 apps (most apps and all games) 1. They are rendered in software on the CPU, so that’s a significant step backward. But NVIDIA has a fix on the way 2. Also, I am advised they’re making the next driver release (470) even more Wayland-friendly. So those are the two main things we’re waiting on right now.

Of that comment, it's interesting to see the "even more Wayland-friendly" remark.

The NVIDIA 470 driver series should begin rolling into beta in the near future so we'll see then what all is coming to that next long-lived driver branch. Let us know in the forums what you hope to see out of the NVIDIA 470 Linux driver series.