NVIDIA announced the first stable release of the new 565 series Linux driver this Sunday!

The new NVIDIA 565.77 driver is marked as the latest new feature branch version for Linux users. The release introduced some new features and various bug-fixes.

Image by William McDonald from Pixabay

According to the release note, the new driver implemented support for VK_EXT_depth_clamp_control. Which, is an extension introduced in Vulkan 1.3.296, allows the application to control the viewport depth clamp range separately from the viewport pname:minDepth and pname:maxDepth.

The release also added several new per-plane and per-CRTC vendor-specific properties to nvidia-drm. Which, may be used by Wayland compositors to program the GPU’s color pipeline for HDR hardware acceleration.

And, it re-enabled GLX_EXT_buffer_age extension on Xwayland, allows applications to query the age of a GLX surface’s back buffer contents. It was previously disabled on Xwayland due to bug, and now it’s fixed.

As well, NVIDIA 565.77 added a new application profile key, “GLVidHeapReuseRatio”, to control the amount of memory OpenGL may hold for later reuse, as well as some application profiles for several Wayland compositors using the new key to work around issues with excessive video memory usage.

The new driver also includes various bug-fixes. It fixed a bug that caused FarCry 5 running through DXVK to display a black screen. And, it improved Wayland support by fixed KDE Plasma 6 crash when running with Wayland, and some crashes Unreal Engine and other applications on Wayland.

There are as well fixes for incorrect color rendering on HDR, cursor rendering issue on Gamescope, app flickering when using Unified Back Buffer (UBB), as well as other fixes and improvements including:

• Add support for mmap of exported DMA-BUF objects.
• Mitigate performance loss from the ‘d3d9.floatEmulation’ option in DXVK.
• Add support for mmap of exported DMA-BUF objects.
• Performance regressions that were observed with Vkd3d 2.9.
• i2c handling issue causes OpenRGB app to set incorrect LED colors on some NVIDIA GPUs
• Changed the fallback preference from 10 BPC YUV422 to 8 BPC RGB + dithering when enabling HDR scanout with limited display bandwidth.
• Some app exit issue due to resource exhaustion on some GPUs while using GSP firmware.
• And crashes with nvidia-drm.modeset=0.

Get NVIDIA 565.77 Driver

The official .run installer for the Linux drivers are available to download through the link below:

For Ubuntu, it’s recommended to wait for the official distribution packages. However, there can be few weeks and even more than a month delay. And, Ubuntu developers seem to prefer building the production branch of NVIDIA driver, and build (sometimes even skip) recent feature branch drivers only for latest Ubuntu releases.

If you can’t wait, then try the popular Proprietary GPU Drivers PPA which updates more frequently, though not for 565 driver series at the moment of writing.