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Today along with upgrading Quake II RTX to support cross-vendor Ray Tracing, NVIDIA had another surprise with the release of the new 460.27.04 Beta driver with quite a number of changes. On top of that, there's also a big new release of the LunarG Vulkan SDK for Ray Tracing.

Firstly, the driver update. Version 460.27.04 is out now, tagged as a Beta release of their mainline drivers. This new driver adds support for these extensions:

  • VK_KHR_acceleration_structure extension.
  • VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline extension.
  • VK_KHR_ray_query extension.
  • VK_KHR_pipeline_library extension.
  • VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations extension.
  • VK_NV_fragment_shading_rate_enums
  • VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate
  • VK_KHR_shader_terminate_invocation
  • VK_EXT_shader_image_atomic_int64
  • VK_KHR_copy_commands2

That's not all. The driver release itself also brings with it bug fixes and numerous improvements for Linux users including support for RandR rotation and reflection while using an NVIDIA-driven display as a PRIME Display Offload sink and "Reverse PRIME Bypass" which is "an optimization that bypasses the bandwidth overhead of PRIME Render Offload and PRIME Display Offload in conditions where a render offload application is fullscreen, unredirected, and visible only on a given NVIDIA-driven PRIME Display Offload output".

With OpenGL and Vulkan the shader disk cache also saw some upgrades this time around too. The location was moved, and the default size has bumped up to 1024MB, although they mentioned that caches with paths containing "/.nv/ will continue to use the previous default of 128MB "unless the size is manually overridden".

See the full driver notes here.


As for the Vulkan Software Development Kit (SDK), The Khronos Group announced today that LunarG have put out a big upgrade to the SDK with full support for the new Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions, including Validation Layers and integration of upgraded GLSL, HLSL and SPIR-V shader tool chains. With this out, plus the new drivers, the pickup of Ray Tracing might start to increase.

"Shipping API specifications was just the first step in building the developer ecosystem for Vulkan Ray Tracing, we now have tools and samples to truly enable developers to tap into the power of cross-platform ray tracing acceleration," said Daniel Koch, senior graphics system software engineer at NVIDIA and Vulkan Ray Tracing TSG chair at Khronos. "One of the key requests from the developer community was the ability to easily bring DirectX 12 ray tracing (DXR) code to Vulkan. We have achieved that through delivering a carefully designed superset of DXR, and integrating Vulkan Ray Tracing support in the DXC open source HLSL compiler."

The press release also mentions that through "the design of Vulkan Ray Tracing, projects such as vkd3d-Proton will be able to efficiently support layered DXR over Vulkan".

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Beta, NVIDIA, Vulkan
30 Likes
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22 comments
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wytrabbit Dec 15, 2020
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QuoteWith OpenGL and Vulkan the shader disk cache also saw some upgrades this time around too. The location was moved, and the default size has bumped up to 1024MB, although they mentioned that caches with paths containing "/.nv/ will continue to use the previous default of 128MB "unless the size is manually overridden".

Yes, finally! Should reduce the daily shader processing after opening the Steam client.
Beamboom Dec 15, 2020
VK_VALVE_mutable_descriptor_type still missing though :(
Ehvis Dec 15, 2020
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Quoting: BeamboomVK_VALVE_mutable_descriptor_type still missing though :(

That should appear in the Vulkan Beta driver first, not immediately in the main driver.
DoctorJunglist Dec 15, 2020
Quoting: BeamboomVK_VALVE_mutable_descriptor_type still missing though :(

That's what I'm waiting for as well, it's needed for Cyberpunk 2077.

I hope it doesn't take Nvidia too long to incorporate this extension into their drivers.
TuxThePenguin Dec 15, 2020
The Beta driver still crashes AC:V so I'm back on stable
3zekiel Dec 15, 2020
Quoting: DoctorJunglist
Quoting: BeamboomVK_VALVE_mutable_descriptor_type still missing though :(

That's what I'm waiting for as well, it's needed for Cyberpunk 2077.

I hope it doesn't take Nvidia too long to incorporate this extension into their drivers.

Quoting: ikirutoRTX 2060 and Ryzen 1700 works without problems on Proton-Experimental with the settings in the screenshots and hex fix.

https://ibb.co/bJ0Z315
https://ibb.co/M75Ndt4
https://ibb.co/p3mMvqw

gamemoderun %command% --launcher-skip

Use a hex editor on the Cyberpunk2077.exe.
Replace "75 30 33 C9 B8 01 00 00 00 0F A2 8B C8 C1 F9 08" with "EB 30 33 C9 B8 01 00 00 00 0F A2 8B C8 C1 F9 08".
Replace "55 48 81 ec a0 00 00 00 0f 29 70 e8" with "c3 48 81 ec a0 00 00 00 0f 29 70 e8".

It seems the fix should be in exe for Nvidia. (second hand info though)
DerBrocken Dec 15, 2020
wtf o.O
Cybolic Dec 15, 2020
Quoting: 3zekiel
Quoting: DoctorJunglist
Quoting: BeamboomVK_VALVE_mutable_descriptor_type still missing though :(

That's what I'm waiting for as well, it's needed for Cyberpunk 2077.

I hope it doesn't take Nvidia too long to incorporate this extension into their drivers.

Quoting: ikirutoRTX 2060 and Ryzen 1700 works without problems on Proton-Experimental with the settings in the screenshots and hex fix.

https://ibb.co/bJ0Z315
https://ibb.co/M75Ndt4
https://ibb.co/p3mMvqw

gamemoderun %command% --launcher-skip

Use a hex editor on the Cyberpunk2077.exe.
Replace "75 30 33 C9 B8 01 00 00 00 0F A2 8B C8 C1 F9 08" with "EB 30 33 C9 B8 01 00 00 00 0F A2 8B C8 C1 F9 08".
Replace "55 48 81 ec a0 00 00 00 0f 29 70 e8" with "c3 48 81 ec a0 00 00 00 0f 29 70 e8".

It seems the fix should be in exe for Nvidia. (second hand info though)

Or, using an update of the script from LordDaveTheKind :

 
$ cp Cyberpunk2077.exe{,bak}
$ offset=$(xxd -u -p Cyberpunk2077.exe | tr -d '\n' | grep -ob 753033C9B8010000000FA28BC8C1F908 | cut -d: -f1); echo EB3033C9B8010000000FA28BC8C1F908 | xxd -r -p -s $(($offset>>1)) - Cyberpunk2077.exe
$ offset=$(xxd -u -p Cyberpunk2077.exe | tr -d '\n' | grep -ob 554881ECA00000000F2970E8 | cut -d: -f1); echo C34881ECA00000000F2970E8 | xxd -r -p -s $(($offset>>1)) - Cyberpunk2077.exe

Haven't checked if it works though either :)
Spirimint Dec 15, 2020
Quoting: 3zekiel
Quoting: DoctorJunglist
Quoting: BeamboomVK_VALVE_mutable_descriptor_type still missing though :(

That's what I'm waiting for as well, it's needed for Cyberpunk 2077.

I hope it doesn't take Nvidia too long to incorporate this extension into their drivers.

Quoting: ikirutoRTX 2060 and Ryzen 1700 works without problems on Proton-Experimental with the settings in the screenshots and hex fix.

https://ibb.co/bJ0Z315
https://ibb.co/M75Ndt4
https://ibb.co/p3mMvqw

gamemoderun %command% --launcher-skip

Use a hex editor on the Cyberpunk2077.exe.
Replace "75 30 33 C9 B8 01 00 00 00 0F A2 8B C8 C1 F9 08" with "EB 30 33 C9 B8 01 00 00 00 0F A2 8B C8 C1 F9 08".
Replace "55 48 81 ec a0 00 00 00 0f 29 70 e8" with "c3 48 81 ec a0 00 00 00 0f 29 70 e8".

It seems the fix should be in exe for Nvidia. (second hand info though)

would you say it works now like amd does?
ikiruto Dec 15, 2020
Quoting: Spirimintwould you say it works now like amd does?
You should have a AMD and Nvidia video card of the same level to compare them.


Last edited by ikiruto on 15 December 2020 at 5:28 pm UTC
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