NVIDIA News Archives

For quite a while Red Hat engineers have been developing the open-source, Rust-written NOVA driver to in effect serve as the successor to the reverse-engineered Nouveau driver that isn't too actively developed in more recent times. But unlike Nouveau's extensive range of NVIDIA GPU support, the NOVA driver is intentionally limited to the RTX 20 "Turing" GPUs and newer where there is the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) with the firmware support to leverage for an easier driver-writing experience. The very initial NOVA driver code was sent out on Sunday for DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window.

It's not only AMD that is working on Vulkan/SPIR-V support for machine learning / AI software but NVIDIA has been working on improvements too for enhancing Vulkan-powered machine learning software. The outlook for using Vulkan within machine learning software is quite positive and even able to offer similar performance to NVIDIA's prized CUDA.

NVIDIA engineers closed out February by releasing the NVIDIA 570.123.01 Vulkan beta driver for Linux and on the Windows side was the NVIDIA 572.63 driver release.

Going into beta just under one month ago was the NVIDIA 570.86.16 Linux driver that brought initial support for GeForce RTX 50 "Blackwell" graphics cards as well as Vulkan driver improvements, Variable Rate Refresh (VRR) support with multiple displays, GPU overclocking exposed by default, and various other refinements to this official NVIDIA Linux driver. Out today is the NVIDIA 570.124.04 stable Linux driver release.

NVIDIA on Thursday published their first public beta of their RTX Neural Texture Compression "RTX NTC" software development kit.

Merged last year for the Linux 6.12 kernel was sched_ext for allowing extensible scheduler possibilities by allowing schedulers to be implemented as eBPF code and dynamically loaded into the kernel. This allows for rapidly developing new schedulers as well as exploring other new possibilities around more intelligent kernel scheduling decisions. Meta, Google, Canonical (Ubuntu), and others have been big proponents of sched_ext and NVIDIA is also increasingly vocalizing their support for these extensible scheduler opportunities.

The open-source Rust CUDA project has been "rebooted" to get back onto the effort of allowing NVIDIA CUDA compute kernels to be coded within the Rust programming language.

The NVIDIA 570.86.16 beta Linux driver was just published in time for the GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 graphics cards hitting store shelves this morning.

With now having a Linux driver for running GPU compute workloads on the GeForce RTX 5090 (as mentioned, Linux gaming benchmarks will come following the formal R570 Linux driver release in the coming days that is better optimized for gaming), I ran some additional GPU compute benchmarks on the GeForce RTX 5090 "Blackwell" graphics card over the weekend.

Now that NVIDIA is rolling out the "Blackwell" GPU driver support, it looks like the NVIDIA Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta generations will soon be moving to a legacy driver branch.

Following the unboxing embargo earlier this week for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090, today the review embargo lifts for the GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition.

The latest from a rather active CES 2025 is NVIDIA announcing the GeForce RTX 50 "Blackwell" series line-up.

NVIDIA compiler engineers have spent the past several months working on a proposed GCC option -flto-partition=locality for having the compiler optimize the code layout for locality between callees and callers as part of the link-time optimization (LTO) process. For some workloads NVIDIA is finding this -flto-partition=locality compiler option being of significant help for bettering the CPU performance.

This year NVIDIA's official Linux graphics driver enjoyed much more robust Wayland support, their open-source kernel modules have matured greatly and are now being used by default, and their proprietary Vulkan and OpenGL drivers remain in good standing for performant Linux gaming and workstation graphics. NVIDIA's Linux driver stack had a rather great year.

NVIDIA today announced the Jetson Orin Nano Super Developer Kit as their "most affordable generative AI Supercomputer" with this upgraded Jetson Nano offering 1.7x better GenAI performance while also costing less than its predecessor. This new product looks like an exciting addition to the NVIDIA Jetson line-up and will have performance benchmarks soon on Phoronix.

NVIDIA published EGL-Wayland 1.1.17 on Monday as the newest update to this Wayland EGL external platform library to provide client-side Wayland support to EGL atop the EGLDevice and EGLStream extensions.

For the past month and a half the NVIDIA R565 Linux driver series has been in public beta with a number of (X)Wayland improvements, DMA-BUF enhancements, VKD3D fixes, and a variety of other enhancements. Today the NVIDIA 565.77 Linux driver was released as the first stable build in the series.

NVIDIA's RTX Remix software for remastering DirectX 8 and DirectX 9 era games is out with the newest version of the RTX-Remix runtime that is powered in part by DXVK for Direct3D to Vulkan mapping.

The NVIDIA MLX5 driver for NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX-5 network adapters is preparing to introduce a new Data Direct Placement "DDP" feature with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel merge window.

Longtime NVIDIA Linux engineer Aaron Plattner shared a status update on Friday around the current feature parity difference between the NVIDIA driver stack on X11 and under (X)Wayland.

Going back to 2016 we've known of NVIDIA beginning to use RISC-V to replace their Falcon micro-controller and other micro-controllers within their graphics processors to using this common open-source ISA. That use has continued to grow and an unofficial estimate now puts it at around one billion RISC-V cores shipping in 2024 NVIDIA chips.

The first NVIDIA R565 series Linux driver beta was released this morning in the form of the NVIDIA 565.57.01 driver release.

Building off the existing Linux support for GPU Direct RDMA / Peer-To-Peer DMA functionality, a set of patches were posted by NVIDIA today enabling this P2P DMA support to also work for device-private pages.

In addition to NVIDIA engineers being at XDC 2024 in Montreal last week for talking about their Wayland driver plans, there was also a presentation by NVIDIA's Daniel Dadap around current Linux challenges in supporting dynamic display mux hardware on modern laptops with iGPU/dGPU combinations and their hopes for improving the support.

At the X.Org Developer's Conference (XDC 2024) happening this week in Montreal, NVIDIA shared a road-map around their Wayland plans as well as encouraging Wayland compositors to target the Vulkan API.

The NVGRACE-GPU VFIO driver was introduced for handling Virtual Function I/O support with the NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchip so that the GPU device could be assigned to guests using KVM/QEMU and similar for virtualization. The NVGRACE-GPU driver is now being extended for supporting the forthcoming NVIDIA Grace Blackwell "GB" designs.

While open-source enthusiasts like to criticize NVIDIA for not maintaining upstream, in-tree kernel graphics driver support (though things have been changing there), for other areas of their vast hardware portfolio they are much better upstream Linux kernel citizens and often at the forefront of new driver innovations. One of the leading examples of that is around the NVIDIA Mellanox networking driver support. With Linux 6.12 they've landed a new feature that has been described as "a sign of things to come, I think we will see more of this in the next 10 years."

NVIDIA engineers have sent out an exciting set of Linux kernel patches for enabling NVIDIA vGPU software support for virtual GPU support among multiple virtual machines (VMs). In aiming for upstream-focused Linux support, this NVIDIA vGPU support is built around the adapted Nouveau driver with the code previously posted for splitting up the Nouveau/NVKM driver components.

OpenBMC as the Linux Foundation project backed by vendors like Intel / Microsoft / Google / Meta for an open-source BMC firmware stack continues to be a growing success. This alternative to long-used proprietary BMC software stacks continues to grow in popularity with AMD now using it on their reference motherboards and Supermicro being another notable user with some of their server platforms. Not entirely new but been meaning to write about it and NVIDIA talked more openly about it this week: NVIDIA is also a big supporter and user of OpenBMC for their high-end AI/HPC servers and BlueField DPU hardware.

Building off the prior NVIDIA 560 beta driver releases, the NVIDIA 560.35.03 stable Linux driver was released today for providing the latest official NVIDIA graphics/compute support for Linux systems.

There's a new release of NVIDIA's EGL-Wayland project for an EGL External Library Platform library implementing EGL on top of EGLDevice and EGLStream extensions. This week's NVIDIA EGL-Wayland 1.15 release is primarily centered on delivering Wayland explicit sync fixes.

Following last month's NVIDIA 560 Linux driver beta release where the open GPU kernel modules are used by default with Turing GPUs and newer, the NVIDIA 560.31.02 Linux driver has debuted today in stable form for the R560 series.

NVIDIA today released their first Linux beta driver in the new R560 driver release branch. Coming days after their NVIDIA 560 Windows driver, out this morning is the NVIDIA 560.28.03 beta Linux driver.

NVIDIA's EGL-Wayland library continues to be maintained as an EGLStream-based Wayland external platform library for client-side Wayland support to EGL atop EGLDevice/EGLStream.

It's been a wild two years since NVIDIA began publishing an open-source Linux GPU kernel driver for Turing GPUs and newer. With the latest NVIDIA 555 Linux driver series that open-source kernel driver support is in great shape and NVIDIA today is out with a lengthy blog post promoting it.

The NVIDIA 555.58 Linux driver has debuted this morning as the first stable version in the R555 driver series. The NVIDIA 555 Linux driver is the most exciting in recent times with offering Wayland explicit sync support, more stable Wayland support in general, and GSP firmware is now used by default on RTX 20 / Turing and newer GPUs where the GPU System Processor is present.

NVIDIA has upstreamed a patch to the GCC 15 compiler for adding the "-mcpu=grace" option to make it easier to target NVIDIA Grace AArch64 CPU cores from this open-source compiler.

A few weeks ago NVIDIA introduced their much anticipated R555 beta driver with NVIDIA 555.42.02 for Linux bringing Wayland explicit sync support, the GPU System Processor (GSP) firmware being used by default, and a variety of Wayland improvements. Today the NVIDIA 555.52.04 beta driver is out that offers additional fixes for the R555 series.

It's coming a week later than anticipated but the NVIDIA R555 Linux driver beta has been released! This is the NVIDIA proprietary Linux driver update that brings Wayland explicit sync support along with a host of other important improvements.

While we are all waiting for the NVIDIA R555 series Linux driver beta that is expected to debut as soon as next week based on prior information with Wayland improvements (explicit sync) and more, with the NVIDIA R560 series Linux driver successor is a very interesting change: NVIDIA is planning on defaulting to using their open-source GPU kernel driver by default for GeForce RTX 2000 "Turing" GPUs and newer.

NVIDIA today released RTX Remix v0.5 as the newest version of this software for remastering old/classic games with path tracing. RTX Remix builds off DXVK and leverages NVIDIA Omniverse and other tech from the green giant like DLSS to enhance older games.

If your interest didn't pique enough when the former Nouveau lead developer joined NVIDIA and sent out a big patch series for this originally-reverse-engineered, open-source NVIDIA kernel driver, here's another plot twist: another NVIDIA engineer opening a merge request adding to the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver.

NVIDIA today released their 550.54.14 driver, which is their first production-ready/stable driver version in the R550 series.

For going along with today's GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER graphics card launch (Linux review in the days ahead due to late arrival of my RTX 40 series hardware), NVIDIA has published their first R550 series Linux driver beta. The NVIDIA 550.40.07 Linux driver is now available with many bug fixes and a few new features.

As part of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series launch RTX Remix was announced for helping game modders remaster older game titles for RTX/ray-tracing. RTX Remix 0.1 debuted last April as the initial version of their software to provide path-tracing support for classic games. Out today is the latest work for helping to remaster classic games with the debut of RTX Remix 0.4.

Following the 2023 highlights for Intel and AMD on Linux, here's a look back at the most popular Linux-related NVIDIA news for the past calendar year.

Ahead of the US Thanksgiving holiday extended weekend, NVIDIA Linux engineers published their 545.29.06 Linux driver as the latest bug-fix release in the R545 series.

As mentioned last week, merged for the Linux 6.7 kernel is NVIDIA GSP firmware support in the Nouveau driver so that these NVIDIA firmware blobs can handle hardware initialization and power management related tasks. This support is optional right now for the GeForce RTX 20 / RTX 30 series hardware with Nouveau but necessary if wanting better performance via re-clocking the GPUs. The GSP firmware is a mandatory requirement for Nouveau with the NVIDIA RTX 40 GPUs and moving forward.

The NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver is an open-source independently-developed project that implements the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) atop NVIDIA's NVDEC interface so that software like Mozilla Firefox can enjoy video hardware acceleration on Linux using NVIDIA's proprietary driver.

Earlier this month NVIDIA published the R545 Linux driver beta while today it's been promoted to the stable series with the NVIDIA 545.29.02 Linux driver release.