Austin Shafer (austin shafer), a developer at Nvidia working on the Linux driver, recently published a report on the state of support for proprietary NVIDIA drivers. The report highlights areas where support for Wayland lags behind X11, citing issues with both the NVIDIA driver itself and limitations of the Wayland protocol and its composite servers. This information pertains to the NVIDIA 575 drivers currently in beta testing.
Notable features that are not yet supported in NVIDIA drivers on systems with Wayland and XWayland due to restrictions on the Wayland Protocol and Composite servers include:
- Stratovypy for stereo-chairs using GLX, EGL, and Vulkan.
- SLI Mosaic mode for combining multiple GPUs into one logical GPU to create a large virtual screen.
- Lack of uniform settings in the NVIDIA-SETTINGS configurator across different composite managers in Wayland systems due to the absence of a single screen configuration mechanism.
While some functionalities may not be achievable due to inconsistencies across different Wayland composite servers, they can be implemented in applications using the Vulkan graphics API and the vk_khr_display extension, enabling direct interaction with the screen without the need for a composite server.
- Stereo rendering with multi-view drawing using vk_khr_multiview.
- Vulkan Explicit SLI with vk_khr_device_group.
- Swap Group and Frame Lock for synchronized frame presentation.
Features currently in development or planned for future NVIDIA drivers include:
- Enabling the “Nvidia-DRM Modeset = 1” default parameter.
- Support for display multiplexers (MUX) on laptops with both integrated and discrete GPUs for direct connections to screens, a functionality not yet supported in Wayland due to composite server limitations.