Introduces the "ResamplingMethod" MetaMode option

May 9, 2017 21:04 GMT  ·  By

Nvidia released today a new short-lived graphics driver for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris operating systems on all supported architectures, bringing various bug fixes, better Vulkan support, and some other improvements.

Probably the most fundamental change of the Nvidia 381.22 graphics driver is support for a bunch of new Vulkan extensions, thus adding an extra layer of support for Vulkan, which these days is more and more used in popular games. However, this was only implemented for the Linux driver.

The newly supported Vulkan extensions are VK_EXT_acquire_xlib_display, VK_EXT_display_control, VK_EXT_direct_mode_display, VK_KHX_external_semaphore, VK_KHX_external_memory_fd, VK_KHX_external_semaphore_fd, VK_EXT_display_surface_counter, and VK_KHX_external_memory.

It's important to keep in mind when installing the Nvidia 381.22 video driver on your GNU/Linux operating system that all these extensions require version 1.0.42 or higher of the Vulkan loader. This release also addresses a Vulkan bug in Vulkan, specifically the direct to display functionality, where DP1.2 monitors weren't identified.

Support for newer Linux kernel branches, bug fixes

Another interesting change of the Nvidia 381.22 graphics driver is compatibility with newer Linux kernel branches, such as Linux 4.10 or 4.11, but it's not mentioned in the release notes so you'll have to test this on your own. Moreover, OpenGL threaded optimizations have been disabled by default, due to it not being stable.

A new MetaMode option called "ResamplingMethod" was implemented as well in Nvidia 381.22 to add support for bicubic resampling methods when using scaling screen transformations, and it looks like the X driver's logo splash screen was removed along with the corresponding NoLogoand LogoPath xorg.conf options.

As expected, a bunch of bugs reported by users since previous versions of the driver have been fixed, and you can study the full changelog below. Download Nvidia 381.22 graphics driver for 64-bit, 32-bit, and ARM 32-bit GNU/Linux distributions, as well as FreeBSD and Solaris systems right now from our website, but we recommend using the long-lived branch instead.

Nvidia 381.22 Changelog