NVIDIA 396.54 Linux Driver Released To Fix A OpenGL/Vulkan Performance Bug

One day after announcing the GeForce RTX 2070/2080 series, NVIDIA has released a new Linux driver. But it's not a major new driver branch at this time (that's presumably coming closer to the 20 September launch date) with the Turing GPU support, but is a point release delivering a practical bug fix.

The sole change listed in today's NVIDIA 396.54 driver update is, "Fixed a resource leak introduced in the 390 series of drivers that could lead to reduced performance after starting and stopping several OpenGL and/or Vulkan applications."

This is actually a bug that came up some weeks back spotted by a performance difference in some Phoronix results compared to older articles. After some weeks, NVIDIA's stellar Linux driver team was able to locate and fix this resource leak. Obviously with our benchmarking where the Phoronix Test Suite is generally running each game benchmark a minimum of three times for statistical accuracy, etc, this resource leak could take a toll after a while. If you reboot your system frequently or aren't firing up a lot of Vulkan/OpenGL games repetitively without rebooting, you probably were not affected.

I'll have some fresh comparison benchmarks up soon of the NVIDIA 396.54 Linux driver. No other changes are noted in this update compared to the 396.51 driver. Those wanting to download the NVIDIA 396.54 Linux driver can do so from NVIDIA.com.