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NVIDIA slip out a small stable Linux driver update with 455.45.01

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It seems NVIDIA are no longer reserving the two extra digits in their Linux driver versioning for their special Betas, as a new stable driver is out today as 455.45.01.

Quite a small driver that's just a few bug fixes but nice to see NVIDIA do updates both big and small. Here's what they say has changed in this version:

  • Kernel 5.9 support
  • Fixed a bug in a Vulkan blending optimization that could produce incorrect results. Some of the Vulkan titles affected by this bug were:
    • Life is Strange 2
    • Shadow of the Tomb Raider
  • Fixed an issue that caused Vulkan swapchain creation to fail for full-screen windows when a G-SYNC monitor is connected.

This is part of their "Short Lived" branch, and should be safe for everyone to upgrade to if you're sticking to that. They also have their "Long Lived" branch currently on version 450.80.02 that was released back in September.

Since the difference isn't obvious, here's our usual reminder on what the changes are between their stable driver branches on Linux as explained by NVIDIA: 

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 are made from each branch. A short-lived branch typically has only one or two (non-beta) releases, while long-lived branches will have several.
[…]
When we make changes to the driver, we evaluate the oldest branch the change needs to go into. New features go into whatever the latest branch is, while bug fixes go into the older branches and are integrated through the newer branches. So using a short-lived branch doesn’t mean that you miss out on fixes, it just means that you also get the latest features.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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8 comments

Ehvis Nov 17, 2020
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I'm curious what this means:

 
Fixed an issue that caused Vulkan swapchain creation to fail for full-screen windows when a G-SYNC monitor is connected.


And how it would affect things in practice.
Boldos Nov 17, 2020
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*Still waiting for nv drivers not to crash GNOME Shell every 2 hours*
THE0R Nov 17, 2020
Quoting: Guest*Still waiting for Kernel 5.9 CUDA fixes* ._.
It has been fixed already! See here. This was posted just now, but strangely, on Arch, CUDA was working on 5.9 for a couple of weeks now (at least for me).
Corben Nov 18, 2020
Quoting: EhvisI'm curious what this means:

 
Fixed an issue that caused Vulkan swapchain creation to fail for full-screen windows when a G-SYNC monitor is connected.


And how it would affect things in practice.

I hope this fixed the issue I have in VR, where there is sometimes a small but noticeable delay. Which I can get rid of by opening the SteamVR dashboard for a moment, but it's still something, that's a bit annoying.
Xpander Nov 18, 2020
Quoting: THE0R
Quoting: Guest*Still waiting for Kernel 5.9 CUDA fixes* ._.
It has been fixed already! See here. This was posted just now, but strangely, on Arch, CUDA was working on 5.9 for a couple of weeks now (at least for me).

it was fixed in 455.38 iirc

im running the vulkan betas without issues either:

xpander@archlinux ~ $ nvidia-smi | grep Driver
| NVIDIA-SMI 455.46.01    Driver Version: 455.46.01    CUDA Version: 11.1     |
xpander@archlinux ~ $ uname -a
Linux archlinux 5.9.8-95-tkg-upds #1 TKG SMP PREEMPT Wed, 18 Nov 2020 10:13:02 +0000 x86_64 GNU/Linux
LinLo Nov 18, 2020
Quoting: EhvisI'm curious what this means:

 
Fixed an issue that caused Vulkan swapchain creation to fail for full-screen windows when a G-SYNC monitor is connected.


And how it would affect things in practice.

This one fixed a part of a several years issue : https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/g-sync-compatibility-with-vulkan/78018/39
So now Kepler generation card (GTX 600/700/Titan series) can launch vulkan games/apps in full-screen without a desktop compositor or with compositor disabled. But... It seems G-SYNC is still not working yet. Maybe one day...
Tested on 455.46.01 (vulkan beta drivers).
Liam Dawe Dec 1, 2020
Note: it seems after they release it, NVIDIA edited the changelog to note this driver has Kernel 5.9 support. Added it to the article.
logge Dec 4, 2020
I was getting nervous, as I was afraid updating my two Arch boxes will break all possible gaming and cuda capabilities... Just now I've googled "is nvidia cuda working with kernel 5.10 now" and I've landed back here :-D

Will try it out soon.


Last edited by logge on 4 December 2020 at 10:37 am UTC
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