NVIDIA has released the proprietary driver NVIDIA 610.43.02, marking the first stable release of the new 610 branch. This driver is now available for Linux (ARM64, x86_64), FreeBSD (x86_64), and Solaris (x86_64). The previous stable branch, NVIDIA 595.x, became the thirteenth branch to have its kernel-level components opened up by NVIDIA.
The source texts for key kernel modules from the new NVIDIA branch, including nvidia.ko, nvidia-drm.ko (Direct Rendering Manager), nvidia-modeset.ko, and nvidia-uvm.ko (Unified Video Memory), are hosted on GitHub. However, the firmware and user-space libraries such as CUDA, OpenGL, and Vulkan stacks remain proprietary.
Some key changes in this release include:
- The nvidia-drm kernel module now supports API for leveraging hardware color conversion capabilities introduced in Linux kernel 6.19. This change allows Wayland-based composite servers to offload color conversion operations, such as those used for HDR, to the NVIDIA display controller.
- Added the ability to create Vulkan logical devices based on multiple physical devices using the VK_KHR_device_group_creation extension, enabled through the environment variable “__VK_ENABLE_DEVICE_GROUPS=1”.
- Implemented Vulkan extensions including VK_EXT_shader_long_vector, VK_KHR_internally_synchronized_queues, and VK_NV_push_constant_bank.
- Added support for EGL framebuffer configurations that use 16-bit floating point (FP16) when using Wayland to represent pixel color values.
- Implemented support for DRM format modifiers for multi-plane formats YCbCr.
- Enabled the mmap operation to file descriptors exported from NVIDIA discrete GPUs.
- Discontinued support for using the NVIDIA X11 driver with the Xinerama X extension.
- Optimizations have been made to improve the performance of the Starfield game and fix regressions in the performance of the Vulkan API in the game “Doom: The Dark Ages” on systems with NVIDIA 590.x drivers.
/Reports, release notes, official announcements.