Nvidia Display Driver 465.24.02 For Linux Is Released
Nvidia's latest proprietary binary blob driver for using Nvidia graphics hardware on Linux adds support for three new Vulkan extensions, Nvidia's upcoming RTX A4000 and A5000 GPUs, better X11 DrawText() performance, numerous bug-fixes and some new Vulkan extensions.
written by 윤채경 (Yoon Chae-kyung) 2021-04-14 - last edited 2021-04-15. © CC BY
A Nvidia FX5200 GPU With 256 MiB RAM. It still works fine if you happen to have an ancient computer with a AGP slot to put it in.
The proprietary closed-source binary driver from Nvidia is something everyone using a Linux-based operating system with Nvidia hardware has to install if they want their GPU to be more than a space filler inside their computer case. A handful of new Vulkan extensions is the most interesting part of their latest 465.24.02 Linux driver release. Those are:
- The
VK_KHR_synchronization2extension which modifies the original core synchronization APIs to simplify the interface and improve usability of these APIs. It also adds new pipeline stage and access flag types that extend into the 64-bit range - The
VK_KHR_workgroup_memory_explicit_layoutextension which allows shaders to explicitly define the layout of workgroup storage class memory and create aliases between variables from that storage class in a compute shader. - The
VK_KHR_zero_initialize_workgroup_memoryextension which allows the use of a null constant initializer on shader workgroup memory variables
Nvidia has also added support for using linear images in host-visible video memory to their Vulkan implementation and fixed several bugs in it. Their release notes mention that they have:
- "Fixed a potential crash in the Vulkan driver when clearing images with multiple layers."
- "Fixed an issue with OpenGL where imported Vulkan buffers would fail with GL_OUT_OF_MEMORY when marked as resident"
- "Fixed corruption in the Vulkan driver that sometimes occurred with shadow rendering with image arrays."
- "Fixed a bug in compilation of SPIR-V intersection shaders when modules with multiple entry points are used."
The only interesting non-Vulkan news in Nvidia's release announcement is a claims that they have improved DrawText() performance on the Xorg display server, support for the newly announced RTX A4000 and A5000 GPUs and a mention of having enabled Runtime D3 Power Management on notebook machines with Ampere and newer GPUs. The remainder of the release announcement consists of less interesting bug-fixes.
Xwayland recently merged support for hardware acceleration on machines using the Nvidia driver in preparation for a Nvidia driver with the proper bits required to provide that functionality. This driver does not have those bits, so those of you stuck with a Nvidia card who want to run X applications on Wayland with GPU acceleration will have to wait for a future driver release from Nvidia which includes those bits.
Neither the README.txt or the NVIDIA_Changelog files within the 465.24.02 does not specify what Kernel, Xorg and Wayland versions are supported. There is a mention of a fix for Linux 5.11 in an earlier driver release, so it is safe to assume that it will work on Linux kernels up to and including Linux 5.11.
The latest proprietary binary blob Linux display driver for Nvidia graphics cards can be acquired from www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/172836/en-us. ClamAV did not find the virus within the self-extracting NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-465.24.02.run file we downloaded. What file you get when you download may vary.
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