NVIDIA 396.18.02 Vulkan Linux Beta Brings Better Shader Performance

Last week NVIDIA released their first 396 Linux driver beta that most notably introduces their new "NVVM" Vulkan SPIR-V compiler. Coming out today is a new Vulkan beta update with some continued enhancements.

The NVIDIA 396.18.02 Linux driver released today isn't through their normal beta channel but rather through the Vulkan-focused Windows/Linux betas offered to developers.

The NVIDIA 396.18.02 driver has shader performance improvements, which look like it will help out DXVK for Direct3D-over-Vulkan Wine gaming and other scenarios.

This driver also updates the resource limits on uniform buffers, samplers, sampled images, and storage buffers per stage values. This is thanks to their new NVVM compiler stack now supporting spilling and the like rather than just relying upon direct hardware limits.

Lastly, this driver also adds support for the VK_EXT_descriptor_indexing extension introduced earlier this month in Vulkan 1.1.72. The descriptor indexing support should be useful to game developers and allows for creating large descriptor sets made up of all their combined resources and selecting those resources via dynamic indexes within a shader.

This new NVIDIA Vulkan beta driver release can be downloaded from developer.nvidia.com.