NVIDIA 545.29.02 Linux Graphics Driver Is Out with Wayland Improvements, More

Adds support to the NVIDIA VDPAU driver on Xwayland and improves support for the Night Light feature on GNOME and KDE Plasma desktops.
Marius Nestorby Marius Nestor0
NVIDIA 535.54.03

After several weeks of beta testing, NVIDIA released today the NVIDIA 545.29.02 graphics driver for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris systems as the latest “new feature” branch bringing numerous new features and some improvements, especially to the open-source Linux kernel modules.

NVIDIA 545.29.02 is here with beta-quality support for NVIDIA GeForce and NVIDIA Workstation GPUs to open-source Linux kernel modules that NVIDIA offers alongside the proprietary variant of its graphics driver.

Since 2024 looks to become the “year of the Wayland desktop(™)”, it’s obvious that the new NVIDIA graphics driver release also improves support for Wayland systems. For example, it improves support for the “Night Light” and “Night Color” features available in the GNOME and KDE Plasma desktop environments when using the Wayland session.

In addition, NVIDIA 545.29.02 introduces support for virtual reality displays, such as Valve’s SteamVR, on Wayland compositors that support DRM leasing. NVIDIA notes the fact that this support depends on Xwayland 22.1.0 and wayland-protocols 1.22, or later.

Talking about Xwayland, this release also adds support to the NVIDIA VDPAU driver on Xwayland. Moreover, the VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) feature now works correctly on Wayland systems.

Some new experimental features are present in this NVIDIA graphics driver release, such as support for runtime D3 (RTD3) power management on desktop GPUs, HDMI 10 bits per component support, as well as support for framebuffer consoles provided by nvidia-drm.

“On kernels that implement drm_fbdev_generic_setup and drm_aperture_remove_conflicting_pci_framebuffers, nvidia-drm will install a framebuffer console when loaded with both modeset=1 and fbdev=1 kernel module parameters. This will replace the Linux boot console driven by a system framebuffer driver such as efifb or vesafb,” reads the release notes.

The nvidia-installer has been updated as well to allow you to install the NVIDIA graphics driver while an existing NVIDIA driver is already loaded, the libnvidia-gpucomp.so helper library is now shipped in the driver by default for GPU shader compilation, and a couple of bugs were fixed to improve support for Ada and Turing GPUs.

Last but not least, NVIDIA 545.29.02 adds support for the EGL_ANDROID_native_fence_sync EGL extension, as well as the VK_EXTERNAL_SEMAPHORE_HANDLE_TYPE_SYNC_FD_BIT and VK_EXTERNAL_FENCE_HANDLE_TYPE_SYNC_FD_BIT Vulkan external handle types when the nvidia-drm kernel module is loaded with the modeset=1 parameter.

The NVIDIA 545.29.02 graphics driver is available for download right now from the official website for 64-bit and AArch64 Linux systems, as well as 64-bit FreeBSD systems, and x64/x86 Solaris systems. You can choose to update using the official installers or from your distro’s repositories.

Last updated 6 months ago

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