NVIDIA Vulkan Beta Driver Updated With Open-GPU-Kernel Support, DRM Format Modifiers

NVIDIA today published the 515.49.05 beta driver as their first Vulkan beta driver update for Linux in one month and also their first re-base against the R515 series. As part of that re-base to the new series, this is the first Vulkan beta driver now supporting NVIDIA's new open-source GPU kernel driver.

The NVIDIA 515.49.05 Vulkan beta driver is their first Vulkan beta supporting the "open-gpu-kernel-modules" release while still the proprietary kernel modules remain supported too. Basically it's the same status as their mainline R515 Linux graphics driver stack.

This beta driver update adds support for the Vulkan EXT_image_drm_format_modifier and EXT_non_seamless_cube_map extensions. There are also some Vulkan bug fixes.

The VK_EXT_image_drm_format_modifier extension allows the NVIDIA driver to now use the DRM format modifiers with Vulkan images, better integrating with the Linux graphics/video/display interfaces. This Vulkan extension can be useful for Wayland compositors and other similar purposes.

The Vulkan beta update can be downloaded from developer.nvidia.com. NVIDIA also published a new open-source GPU kernel driver release aligned for this v515.49.05 compatibility.

The version puts this new beta slightly newer than the NVIDIA 515.48.07 Linux driver that is the current stable and released at the end of May.