14 DAY TRIAL // A new driver that comes with Vulkan support has been released by Nvidia for the Linux platform, and it goes to show that the company is quite serious about the new endeavor.
Vulkan 1.0 was released a couple of weeks ago, and all the big hardware makers released drivers that support the new specification, including Intel, Nvidia, and AMD. Now, Nvidia has returned now with a new Beta for this temporary branch of the drivers.
The plan is to have a single driver that has support for everything, and that doesn't need to be differentiated, but for now, this is how things are. Even if Vulkan was released with the 1.0 version, it doesn't mean that the work of the Khronos Group is over. In fact, now that it's out, it means that they need to pick up the pack.
New Nvidia driver with performance fixes
Unless you really need this driver to test a few of the games that have support for Vulkan, or you are a developer, there is no good reason to complicate your life. In any case, the drivers are here for anyone who decides to try them.
"NVIDIA is fully committed to invest in OpenGL that our ISVs rely on and will continue to support and improve it. NVIDIA believes in providing maximum functionality with minimal churn to developers. Hence, NVIDIA fully supports both Vulkan and OpenGL. We plan to include Vulkan in both Windows and Linux drivers in an upcoming driver release. These will be available to all users to run Vulkan content as part of our regular driver releases," developers have explained.
According to the changelog, support for 64-bit vertex attribute formats has been added, the performance of vkBindBufferMemory, vkBindImageMemory and vkCreateGraphicsPipelines has been improved, Fermi-based GPUs are no longer enumerated in vkEnumeratePhysicalDevices, and the compatibility with recent Linux kernels has been improved.
You can download the latest Nvidia Vulkan-compatible drivers from Softpedia, but please keep in mind that they are still in the Beta stages.