NVIDIA 550 Linux Beta Driver Released With Many Fixes, VR Displays & Better (X)Wayland

For going along with today's GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER graphics card launch (Linux review in the days ahead due to late arrival of my RTX 40 series hardware), NVIDIA has published their first R550 series Linux driver beta. The NVIDIA 550.40.07 Linux driver is now available with many bug fixes and a few new features.

The NVIDIA R550 Linux driver is bringing support for R8 / GR88 / YCbCr GBM formats, using transparent huge pages for the .text section where available, experimental support for HDMI 10-bits per component, support for PRIME render offload to the Vulkan Wayland WSI, beta quality support for GeForce and Workstation GPUs on the Open Kernel Modules, experimental support for run-time D3 power management for desktop GPUs, various new Vulkan extensions, support for VR displays such as the SteamVR platform on Wayland compositors via DRM leasing, support for the VDPAU video acceleration on XWayland, and other changes.

Overall this is quite a big driver update for NVIDIA's proprietary Linux graphics driver especially as it concerns (X)Wayland support.

The full list of NVIDIA R550 Linux beta driver fixes and other changes via NVIDIA.com. With a stack of new NVIDIA GPUs here, some fresh RTX 40 series benchmarks and looking at the R550 series Linux performance soon on Phoronix.