NVIDIA have two new Linux drivers available, one stable and one Vulkan Beta

NVIDIA continue pushing their drivers forwards with two new Linux driver updates available. Let's take a quick look.

First, the stable 440.44 driver release as part of their long-lived branch. This adds support for the Quadro T2000 with Max-Q Design, you can now use the "__GL_SYNC_DISPLAY_DEVICE" environment variable for Vulkan applications and it fixes a few bugs like tearing with a G-SYNC or G-SYNC Compatible monitor when you've got something running directly on a display (like VR).

What does "long-lived" mean? Here's what NVIDIA themselves said about it (source):

Any given release branch is either long-lived or short-lived. The difference is in how long the branch is maintained and how many releases made from each branch. A short-lived branch typically has only one or two (non-beta) releases, while long-lived branches will have several.

So it's a question of release cycle, not how stable they are.

On top of that there's a new Vulkan Beta Driver 440.43.01, which has now been re-based to the 440 release branch with all the recent changes and improvements since the 435 re-base in August. On top of that it also fixes rendering to 3D depth/stencil image slices, various resource leaks and improves the Vulkan driver startup time.

As a reminder, NVIDIA have a possibly very interesting talk next year which may contain some open source announcements and future plans. It's going to be exciting to find out more!