14 DAY TRIAL // Nvidia has released a third set of drivers that are Vulkan-compatible, and they seem to put a lot of effort into this new endeavor.
The Vulkan 1.0.4 specifications landed just a few days ago, and the company is ready with a new driver for the Linux users. It shows a much better involvement from Nvidia since the release of Vulkan, but that's understandable since they are on the front lines for the new API.
Vulkan is being developed by the Khronos Group, which is a consortium of companies from all over the industry. The most prominent companies that are spearheading the new project are Valve and Nvidia, which is also probably why we have three different drivers in less than a month.
Nvidia 55.00.29 Linux driver improves supported
For now, the regular drivers and the Vulkan-ready drivers are launched in separate branches, but that won't remain true for long. For now, the latter ones are still in the Beta stages, and there is no indication that they are closing on the stable version.
According to the changelog, the Vulkan API version v1.0.4 is now supported, a device lost issue with some MSAA resolves has been fixed, vkGetQueryPoolResults() when queryCount=0 error has been repaired, and the handling of sparse image miptail, when the whole image fits on a page, has been fixed.
Also, the GPU texturing performance in some cases has been improved, vkCmdCopyImage() performance has been refined, and a number of smaller fixes have been implemented as well.
As it stands right now, the driver provides support for anything above the GeForce 600 series, starting with the GeForce GT 630.
You can download the latest Nvidia Vulkan-compatible driver from Softpedia, but please keep in mind that it is still in the Beta stages. There aren't too many Vulkan-ready applications or games, so unless you need it, there is no good reason to install it.