Highlights since R550 Beta Release 550.40.07

• Fixed a bug that caused HDMI FRL displays to flicker or blank when enabling VRR with 8 bits per color channel.
  
• Fixed a regression introduced with the 550.40.07 beta driver which caused corrupted window decorations in some applications when running on GNOME.
  
• Fixed a bug where vkAcquireNextImageKHR() was not returning VK_ERROR_OUT_OF_DATE_KHR when it should with WSI X11 swapchains.
  
• Fixed a bug where fences passed to VkSwapchainPresentFenceInfoEXT could signal earlier than expected when a WSI X11 swap chain becomes out of date.
  
• Fixed Xid errors on Hogwarts Legacy and Forza Horizon 4.
  
• Added support for the VK_KHR_video_encode_queue, VK_KHR_video_encode_h264, VK_KHR_video_encode_h265 and VK_KHR_video_maintenance1 extensions.
  
• Fixed a regression which prevented some Vulkan applications from receiving VK_DEVICE_LOST upon a VT switch, which could lead to the application hanging or behaving incorrectly.
  
• Fixed a bug that prevented nvidia-installer from honoring the --gbm-backend-dir command line option.
  
  

Highlights from R550 Beta Release 550.40.07

• Fixed an issue that sometimes caused Wayland applications to run at less than one frame per second on Maxwell, Volta, and Pascal series GPUs.
• Fixed a bug that caused an intermittent drop in desktop framerate.
• Fixed a bug that caused "Flip event timeout" messages to be printed to the system log when displays are hotplugged when nvidia-drm is loaded with the `fbdev=1` kernel module parameter.
• Fixed intermittent Xid errors on Horizon Zero Dawn, Metro Exodus, Forza Horizon 5, and Halo Infinite.
• Fixed a bug which prevented the "NoMaxPClkCheck" mode validation token from working on single-link TMDS (e.g. DVI, HDMI) outputs.
• Fixed a bug that allowed VRR displays to be driven below their minimum refresh rate, resulting in a blank or flickering image.
• Added an application profile to improve Kwin performance on hybrid GPU systems by setting OGL_DEDICATED_HW_STATE_PER_CONTEXT=ENABLE_ROBUST.
• Updated the build process for NVIDIA kernel modules to honor the INSTALL_MOD_DIR Kbuild environment variable.
• Added support for R8, GR88 and YCbCr GBM formats.
• Optimized the X driver headless framerate limiter to more closely mimicupstream behavior and prevent it from activating in inconvenient situations. Added a new X config option "LimitFrameRateWhenHeadless" to disable the headless framerate limiter.
• Fixed a bug that prevented Gamescope from running when using the NVIDIA Open GPU Kernel modules.
• Fixed a bug that prevented the installer package from being unpacked on systems where zstd is not installed, when /tmp is mounted noexec.
• Use transparent huge pages when available for the .text section. This is done through madvise() calls, and requires CONFIG_READ_ONLY_THP_FOR_FS.
• Fixed a regression that prevented setting backlight brightness levels.
• Fixed a bug that could lead to UI corruption in nvidia-installer on systems with more than one initramfs file per kernel.
• Fixed a bug that caused games built on the Source 2 engine to hang when running under Xwayland.
• Added experimental HDMI 10 bits per component support; enable by loading nvidia-modeset with `hdmi_deepcolor=1`.
• Added support for HDR signaling via the HDR_OUTPUT_METADATA and Colorspace per-connector DRM properties when nvidia-drm is loaded with the `modeset=1` parameter.
• Added support for PRIME render offload to Vulkan Wayland WSI.
• Added support for the CTM, DEGAMMA_LUT, and GAMMA_LUT DRM-KMS CRTC properties. These are used by features such as the "Night Light" feature in GNOME and the "Night Color" feature in KDE, when they are used as Wayland compositors.
• Added CERTIFIED-quality support for GeForce and Workstation GPUs to open kernel modules. Please see the "Open Linux Kernel Modules" chapter in the README for details.
• Added initial experimental support for runtime D3 (RTD3) power management on Desktop GPUs.  Please see the 'PCI-Express Runtime D3 (RTD3) Power Management' chapter in the README for more details.
• Added support for the EGL_ANDROID_native_fence_sync EGL extension and the VK_EXTERNAL_SEMAPHORE_HANDLE_TYPE_SYNC_FD_BIT andVK_EXTERNAL_FENCE_HANDLE_TYPE_SYNC_FD_BIT Vulkan external handle types when the nvidia-drm kernel module is loaded with the modeset=1 parameter.
• Added experimental support for framebuffer consoles provided bynvidia-drm. On kernels that implement drm_fbdev_generic_setup anddrm_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.
  
  

Note that when an nvidia-drm framebuffer console is enabled, unloading nvidia-drm will cause the screen to turn off.

• Updated nvidia-installer to allow installing the driver while an existing NVIDIA driver is already loaded.
• Added support for virtual reality displays, such as the SteamVR platform, on Wayland compositors that support DRM leasing. Support requires xwayland version 22.1.0 and wayland-protocols version 1.22, or later.  Tested on sway, minimum version 1.7 with wlroots version 0.15, and also on Kwin, minimum version 5.24.
  
  

Note: Before xwayland 23.2, there is a known issue with HDMI displays where the headset will fail to start a second time after closing SteamVR.  This can be worked around by unplugging and replugging in the headset.

• Fixed a bug that prevented VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) from working with Wayland.
• Changed the name visible in /proc/devices of NVIDIA devices and the NVIDIA control device from "nvidia-frontend" to "nvidia" and "nvidiactl". Scripts which parse /proc/devices (such as udev rules) may need to be updated. Note that the conventional /dev device paths like /dev/nvidia0and /dev/nvidiactl remain unchanged.
• Added support to the NVIDIA VDPAU driver for running in Xwayland. Please refer to the "Xwayland support in VDPAU" section of the README for further details.
• Added libnvidia-gpucomp.so to the driver package.  This is a helper library used for GPU shader compilation.
• Removed libnvidia-vulkan-producer.so from the driver package. This helper library is no longer needed by the Wayland WSI.