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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
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22 comments
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Spirimint Dec 15, 2020
Quoting: ikiruto
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.

How about an RTX2060?


Last edited by Spirimint on 15 December 2020 at 5:46 pm UTC
ikiruto Dec 15, 2020
Quoting: SpirimintHow about an RTX2060?
I have RTX 2060. It remains to find the AMD video card.


Last edited by ikiruto on 15 December 2020 at 5:52 pm UTC
3zekiel Dec 15, 2020
Quoting: Spirimint
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?

As said, it is second hand info, I just fwd you info I read hoping it helps, so can't tell. It just seems some users are having an experience without problem with that patch, which seems to indicate there is an issue in exe.

And as @ikiruto pointed out, you would then have to have similar level cards to compare performance. Which I am in even less of a position to help with.
elmapul Dec 15, 2020
that is cute and all, but a little too litle, to late...
i mean, where is dlss? without this, the performance will go south...
and by the time we get dlss, they will have made another tech that we dont have too.
Shmerl Dec 15, 2020
I don't think anyone plans to support DLSS in Wine anyway, so it's irrelevant. If you need upscaling, AMD are working on something that will work across all GPUs so that should work in Wine eventually too.


Last edited by Shmerl on 15 December 2020 at 8:33 pm UTC
Gazoche Dec 15, 2020
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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)

Doesn't that hex edit only affects the core scaling of the game ? Vk3d3d devs were saying that the engine is relying on undefined behavior in DX12, which is the cause of the crashes. I doubt core scaling has anything to do with that.
Besides, the crash are very random, so just because he didn't experience them after applying the fix doesn't mean the issue is solved.
Phlebiac Dec 16, 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 wasn't clear on that bit. It sounded like using that extension just happened to work around stupid bugs in the game. So if the game gets good bugfixes, then that extension is probably unnecessary. After all, it mostly works on Nvidia already (with probably the same amount of crashing that is seen on Windows, from what I've heard).
ikiruto Dec 16, 2020
Quoting: GrabbyDoesn't that hex edit only affects the core scaling of the game ? Vk3d3d devs were saying that the engine is relying on undefined behavior in DX12, which is the cause of the crashes. I doubt core scaling has anything to do with that.
Besides, the crash are very random, so just because he didn't experience them after applying the fix doesn't mean the issue is solved.
Research is not a matter of faith, if there is something that needs verification, it should be verified, and not refer to your doubts. Crashes of the game are corrected not by the first line, but by the second.
 Signature of AVX bug is as follows:
Game crashes at and beyond these locations:
Take a seat for Corpo
Exit bar for Street Kid
After cutscene for arrival at city for Nomad   

You can do this mod yourself trivially. Simply use a hex editor on the Cyberpunk2077.exe,
and 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". 
This simply turns the bad AVX call into a return.
DISCLAIMER: May be breaking things under the hood, but seems stable.
Rooster Dec 16, 2020
Quoting: wytrabbit
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.

Is this related to the annoying "Processing Vulkan Shaders" message I keep getting on every Steam Play title?
rustybroomhandle Dec 16, 2020
Quoting: PhlebiacIt sounded like using that extension just happened to work around stupid bugs in the game. So if the game gets good bugfixes, then that extension is probably unnecessary. After all, it mostly works on Nvidia already (with probably the same amount of crashing that is seen on Windows, from what I've heard).

Correct. I think fixes from CDPR will come long before any valve-specific vulkan extentions get added to nvidia drivers.
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