NVIDIA has released the first stable release of a new branch of the NVIDIA proprietary driver 495.74. At the same time, an update was proposed to the stable branch of NVIDIA 470.82.00. The driver is available for Linux (ARM64, x86_64), FreeBSD (x86_64) and Solaris (x86_64).
Main innovations:
- Implemented support for the GBM (Generic Buffer Manager) API and added a symlink nvidia-drm_gbm.so pointing to the libnvidia-allocator.so backend, compatible with the GBM loader from Mesa 21.2. EGL support for the GBM platform (EGL_KHR_platform_gbm) is implemented using the egl-gbm.so library. The change is aimed at improving Wayland support on Linux systems with NVIDIA drivers.
- Added an indicator for support for PCI-e Resizable BAR (Base Address Registers) technology, which allows the CPU to access the entire GPU video memory and in some situations increases GPU performance by 10-15%. The effect of optimization is clearly visible in the games Horizon Zero Dawn and Death Stranding.
- The requirements for the minimum supported version of the Linux kernel have been raised from 2.6.32 to 3.10.
- The nvidia.ko kernel module has been updated, which can now be loaded in the absence of a supported NVIDIA GPU, but if there is an NVIDIA NVSwitch device in the system.
- Added support for the EGL extension EGL_NV_robustness_video_memory_purge.
- Extended support for the Vulkan graphics API. Implemented extensions VK_KHR_present_id, VK_KHR_present_wait and VK_KHR_shader_subgroup_uniform_control_flow.
- Added a command line option "--no-peermem" to nvidia-installer to disable installation of the nvidia-peermem kernel module.
- NvIFROpenGL support has been discontinued and the libnvidia-cbl.so library has been removed, which is now supplied in a separate package rather than as part of the driver.
- Fixed an issue that caused the X server to crash when starting a new server using PRIME technology.
Source: opennet.ru