NVIDIA 525.60.11 Linux Graphics Driver Adds Dynamic Boost Support on AMD Laptops

NVIDIA 525.60.11

NVIDIA released today NVIDIA 525.60.11 as a new production-ready version of its proprietary/open-source graphics driver for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris systems adding numerous improvements, new features, and bug fixes.

Highlights of the NVIDIA 525.60.11 release include Dynamic Boost support on laptops powered by AMD processors, support for the EGL_MESA_platform_surfaceless extension, performance improvements for PRIME render-offloaded apps, as well as support for OTA (Over-the-Air) updates in the Proton and Wine NVIDIA NGX build.

The OTA feature is disabled by default, so users will who update to NVIDIA 525.60.11 will have to manually enable it by setting the PROTON_ENABLE_NGX_UPDATER environment variable to value “1”.

Another interesting change in the new NVIDIA graphics driver release is the fact that NVIDIA updated the open-source kernel modules to add support for Quadro Sync, Stereo, rotation in X11, and YUV 4:2:0 on the NVIDIA Turing GPU architecture.

The NVIDIA Installer received a lot of attention in this release, adding the ability for non-root users to use the --add-this-kernel feature, support for displaying a more accurate progress bar when building the kernel modules and a warning message when a VulkanICD loader isn’t detected, and support for using command -v to determine the availability and location of certain tools.

Moreover, the NVIDIA Installer now features an updated error message that’s displayed when kernel header files can’t be found to print full paths for missing files, as well as revamped DKMS support to allow kernel modules to be optionally registered with DKMS after the installer has already built and installed them on its own.

Among other noteworthy changes, the NVIDIA 525.60.11 release adds a new CUDA Debugger implementation for Pascal and newer NVIDIA GPU architectures as a part of the driver package, improves Dynamic Boost support on some Ampere GPU-based laptops, and updates the Vulkan driver to ensure some extensions no longer depend on the nvidia-uvm.ko kernel module is loaded at runtime.

Many bugs were addressed in this release to fix a regression in support for the Warp & Blend geometry distortion technology, a bug in Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered video game affecting Turing and later GPU architectures, a bug in nvidia-settings that prevented it from finding the right fan speed ranges on some GPUs, as well as a regression in the NVIDIA 515.76 release that caused blank screens and hangs when starting an X server on NVIDIA RTX 30 series GPUs.

Also fixed is a bug that caused stutter when moving windows in the GNOME desktop environment, a bug that caused suspend to fail on GNOME 3.x systems running a Wayland compositor with the NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations setting enabled, and a bug in the Vulkan driver that could lead corrupted geometry and tessellation control shaders.

Last but not least, NVIDIA 525.60.11 removes the hard dependency on GTK 2 when building nvidia-settings from sources. This means that nvidia-settings can now only be built with GTK 2 support only, GTK 3 support only, or both with GTK 2 and GTK 3 support.

For more details on the changes implemented in this release, check out the release notes, from where you can also download the NVIDIA 525.60.11 installer for 64-bit and AArch64 (ARM64) systems, as well as for FreeBSD and Solaris systems. Again, this is a production-ready version of NVIDIA’s graphics driver and it’s a highly recommended update for all NVIDIA GPU users.

Image credit: NVIDIA Corporation

Last updated 1 year ago

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