NVIDIA 396.18.07 Vulkan Driver Continues Addressing Fallout From The New SPIR-V Compiler

While this week brought the NVIDIA 396.24 stable Linux driver, for those Vulkan developers/gamers there is a new beta release that is actually version 396.18.07 but contains their very latest Vulkan changes.

This NVIDIA Vulkan beta driver for Linux out now is version 396.18.07 while the Windows version is at 397.54. The only official change with this latest beta driver is continuing to fix more bugs around their new Vulkan SPIR-V shader compiler.

NVIDIA's latest driver series introduced their new "NVVM" SPIR-V compiler that now leverages LLVM and is a clean-sheet design compared to their old shader compiler that was piped through their GLSL-style IR code-paths.

The NVVM compiler has been yielding promising results albeit with the big change has resulted in multiple frequent beta updates for taking care of issues uncovered. This beta Vulkan driver can be downloaded from developer.nvidia.com.