NVIDIA today issued the 580.94.11 driver release as their newest Vulkan beta driver for Linux customers. Most notable with this beta driver update is adding VK_EXT_hdr_metadata support.

The NVIDIA Windows driver has supported the VK_EXT_hdr_metadata extension ( [1]all the way back to 2018 ) and the open-source Mesa Linux drivers also [2]supported this HDR metadata extension while only now is being enabled by the NVIDIA Linux driver. VK_EXT_hdr_metadata is used for dealing with SMPTE 2086 metadata and CATA 861.3 metadata for Vulkan swapchains.

The VK_EXT_hdr_metadata extension [3]dates back to the Vulkan 1.0 days in 2017 . This extension in turn is already [4]used by Wine and other applications. The VK_EXT_hdr_metadata extension only works under Wayland and not X.Org/X11.

In addition to enabling VK_EXT_hdr_metadata for the NVIDIA 580.94.11 Linux driver, today's beta driver update also brings some minor VK_EXT_present_timing improvements for Linux users plus some performance improvements to vkCmdWriteTimestamp under some circumstances.

The updated NVIDIA Linux Vulkan driver beta can be downloaded from [5]developer.nvidia.com .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-396.54.02-Released

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-Vulkan-WSI-HDR-CM

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Vulkan-1.0.43-Released

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wine-VK_EXT_hdr_metadata

[5] https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver