NVIDIA Releases Vulkan 381.26.13 Beta Linux Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA Releases Vulkan 381.26.13 Beta Linux Driver

NVIDIA's driver team has today released new Vulkan beta drivers for both Windows and Linux...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-Vulkan-381.26.13

[edoantonioco]

recent changes aren't changing that much, maybe these drivers are getting mature-enough.

[theriddick]

Really wish AMD and RADV would catch up, its kind of silly that NVIDIA is currently king of VulkanAPI performance in titles atm. Good on them of cause, its just when AMD's OGL performance always exceeds RADV, its kinda sad to see.

[oleid]

Your can use AMD's proprietary vulkan driver for the time being. It works fine alongside radeonsi.

[theriddick]

I think AMD's proprietary vulkan driver has some performance issues also? I will need to recheck the scores as I can't remember if it was competitive vs NVIDIA or not.

[aufkrawall]

Shouldn't AMD's amdgpu-pro Vulkan driver show the same performance like the Windows driver?
I wouldn't interpet too much into benchmark results of some games like Dota 2, this game for example also runs very slowly with Radeons on Windows, compared to Nvidia.
It probably also got hard to best RadeonSI since it became so good.

[Azrael5]

how long for the stable release?

[Guest]

how long for the stable release?

The vulkan betas are side branches (381.xx with vulkan patches/improvements in this case). The stable mainline driver is 384.xx.
So we can probably expect those patches/improvements to be merged for the next mainline beta (385 or higher).

[JustRob]

This is going to be great if from now on AMD and NVidia get into a "Let's get it working on Linux" competition.

Manufacturers should feel responsibility to have working Drivers for popular Platforms and at least a slightly stripped down version in Source Code (if there's something proprietary that is worth more protected than open source).

Hardware has to work when you buy it, it's really that simple. With working Hardware (and necessary Drivers) the community and Software Developers can write great Programs that will further propel great Hardware - no point in paying to suffer with things that don't work well (when you buy a Car you're not required to be a Mechanic).

If Manufacturers hate releasing working Drivers so much (with Source Code) then have it in Firmware and adopt the standard API.

Stuffs gotta work, can't say that enough.

Decades ago stuff worked or was returned.

"Really only works on Windows, and only certain versions" is not great Marketing.

It's great that AMD and NVidia are answering the call.

PS: Thanks for checking this out for us Michael. 👍👍

[bug77]

The vulkan betas are side branches (381.xx with vulkan patches/improvements in this case). The stable mainline driver is 384.xx.
So we can probably expect those patches/improvements to be merged for the next mainline beta (385 or higher).

Fwiw, Nvidia's beta are solid. If you don't actually need a feature from the newer branch, going back to 381 is a viable option.