NVIDIA 520.56.06 Graphics Driver Brings Support for OTA Updates in Proton and Wine

Marius Nestorby Marius Nestor0
NVIDIA 520.56.06

NVIDIA released today the NVIDIA 520.56.06 graphics driver for GNU/Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD systems to add various new features and improvements for better support in games and other 3D apps.

NVIDIA 520.56.06 is here to implement support for OTA (Over-the-Air) updates in the Proton and Wine NVIDIA NGX build, making it easier to update the graphics driver to the latest version. However, this feature is not enabled by default, so users will have to manually enable it by setting the PROTON_ENABLE_NGX_UPDATER environment variable to value “1”.

This release also updates the Vulkan driver to be able to load the VK_KHR_acceleration_structure, VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations, VK_KHR_ray_query, VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline, VK_NV_cuda_kernel_launch, VK_NV_ray_tracing, VK_NV_ray_tracing_motion_blur, VK_NVX_binary_import, and VK_NVX_image_view_handle extensions at runtime without having to depend on the nvidia-uvm.ko kernel module.

On top of that, the Vulkan driver received a fix for a bug that could lead to corruption in geometry and tessellation control shaders.

Also updated is the nvidia-installer, which now allows the use of the --add-this-kernel feature by non-root users, shows a more accurate progress bar when building kernel modules, and displays a warning when a Vulkan ICD loader isn’t detected. In addition, DKMS support has been reworked so that the kernel modules will now be optionally registered with DKMS.

“The kernel modules will now be optionally registered with DKMS after the installer has already built and installed them on its own. nvidia-installer will now register the kernel modules with DKMS by default when the dkms(8) utility is detected on the system,” reads the release notes.

Other than that, the NVIDIA 520.56.06 graphics driver adds a new CUDA Debugger implementation for Pascal and newer NVIDIA GPU architectures, improves support for the Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered video game on Turing and later NVIDIA GPU architectures, and improves support for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series GPUs.

The NVIDIA 520.56.06 graphics driver is available for download from the official website for 64-bit and AArch64 (ARM64) architectures on GNU/Linux systems, as well as for 64-bit FreeBSD and 64-bit/32-bit Solaris systems. However, please keep in mind that this is a “new feature branch” version, not production-ready.

Image credits: NVIDIA Corporation

Last updated 2 years ago

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