NVIDIA R535 Linux Beta Brings New Vulkan Extensions, DMA-BUF v4 Wayland Protocol

NVIDIA has a nice treat to end out May for Linux users by publishing their first beta build in the R535 feature series.

The NVIDIA 535.43.02 Linux driver is available this morning as the first public beta build in this R535 series that will succeed the R530 release stream. The NVIDIA R535 Linux series is bringing support for new Vulkan extensions like VK_EXT_memory_priority and VK_EXT_pageable_device_memory. There is also notably support for the DMA-BUF v4 Wayland protocol as a newer version of DMA-BUF support that is very good to see supported by the proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver stack.

Some of the other changes in the NVIDIA 535.43.02 Linux driver include better Minecraft (Java Edition) performance for GeForce RTX 3000 series hardware, a memory leak fix for the NVIDIA GLX driver, support for high pixel clock mode timings like 8K@60, extended Dynamic Boost range for prior generation AMD laptops, suspend-and-resume support when using the NVIDIA GSP firmware, and a variety of other changes and bug fixes.

- Added support for the VK_EXT_memory_priority, and VK_EXT_pageable_device_memory extensions for Turing+ GPUs.
- Improved the performance of Minecraft Java Edition on RTX 3000 series GPUs.
- Fixed a memory leak in the NVIDIA GLX driver.
- Added support for driving very high pixel clock mode timings such as 8K @ 60Hz. Please see the "MaxOneHardwareHead" X11 ModeValidation token in the README for details.
- Extended Dynamic Boost support on notebooks to include older Renoir and Cezanne chipsets, in addition to Rembrandt and newer AMD chipsets.
- Fixed a bug that caused Vulkan X11 swapchain creation to fail on GPUs without a display engine when the VK_KHR_present_id extension is used.
- Fixed console restore on legacy VGA consoles when using the NVIDIA Open GPU Kernel Modules.
- Added nvoptix.bin to the driver package. This data file is used by the OptiX ray tracing engine library, libnvoptix.so.1.
- Removed libnvidia-compiler.so.VERSION from the driver package. This functionality is now provided by other driver libraries.
- Added power usage and power limits information to nvidia-settings PowerMizer page.
- Updated NV_CTRL_GPU_POWER_SOURCE NV-CONTROL API to report undersized power source.
- Add support for version 4 of the linux-dmabuf wayland protocol.
- Added NV-CONTROL attributes NV_CTRL_FRAMELOCK_MULTIPLY_DIVIDE_MODE and NV_CTRL_FRAMELOCK_MULTIPLY_DIVIDE_VALUE to allow syncing a Quadro Sync II card to different House Sync signal rates. This feature requires firmware version 2.18 or later; to download the latest firmware version.
- Added support for the VK_KHR_video_queue, VK_KHR_video_decode_queue, VK_KHR_video_decode_h264 and VK_KHR_video_decode_h265 extensions.
- Added an application profile to avoid performance problems in Xfce 4 when the OpenGL compositor backend is enabled along with G-SYNC.
- Added support for suspend and resume when using GSP firmware.
- Moved the nvidia-settings application icon into the 'hicolor' icon theme, which allows it to be customized by other icon themes selected in the desktop environment.
- Fixed a bug that prevented PRIME render offload from working for Wayland applications when running on a system with an AMD iGPU.
- Fixed a bug that prevented nvidia-installer from recording kernel log output to the installer log in some module loading failure paths.
- Changed nvidia-installer to no longer use the $XDG_DATA_DIRS environment variable. XDG data files are now installed to a path specified by the --xdg-data-dir option, or /usr/share if not specified.
- This fixes a problem when Flatpak is installed that caused the installer to place the nvidia-settings.desktop file in /root/.local/share/flatpak/exports/share/applications.
- Changed the behavior of glXGetRefreshRateSGI() for non-integer refresh rates to round to the nearest whole number rather than truncating.
- Changed the compression format of the .run installer package from xz to zstd. This results in a smaller compressed package, and faster decompression performance. A fallback zstd decompressor is embedded into the installer package for systems which do not already have a zstd decompression program installed.
- Fixed a bug that caused nvidia-installer to mistakenly unload some already loaded non-NVIDIA kernel modules.
- Fixed a bug which caused incorrect reporting of presentation times when using the VK_NV_present_barrier Vulkan extension.

The NVIDIA R535 Linux beta can be downloaded at NVIDIA.com.