NVIDIA recently released the release of the first stable version of the new branch of proprietary drivers "NVIDIA 495.44" in which support has been eliminated for various models among which are the GeForce 600,700 series, Nvidia quadro, among others.
In addition to that also at the same time, an update for the stable branch of NVIDIA 470.82.00 has been proposed in which some bug fixes have been included.
NVIDIA 495.44 Top New Features
In this new version of the drivers we can find that added support for GBM API (Generic Buffer Manager) and added symlink nvidia-drm_gbm.so pointing to libnvidia-allocator.so backend compatible with Mesa 21.2 GBM bootloader.
Besides, also EGL support for the GBM platform (EGL_KHR_platform_gbm) it is implemented using the egl-gbm.so library. The change is intended to improve Wayland support on Linux systems with NVIDIA drivers.
It is also highlighted that added a support flag for PCI-e Resizable BAR technology (Base Address Registers), which allows the CPU to access all the video memory of the GPU and in some situations it increases GPU performance by 10-15%. The optimization effect is clearly visible in the Horizon Zero Dawn and Death Stranding games. The resizable bar is only compatible with GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards.
Moreover, the updated kernel module nvidia.ko is highlighted, which can now be loaded without a supported NVIDIA GPU, but with an NVIDIA NVSwitch device in the system, and the requirements for the minimum supported Linux kernel version have been raised from 2.6.32 to 3.10.
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:
- Added support for the EGL EGL_NV_robustness_video_memory_purge extension.
- Expanded support for Vulkan graphics API. The VK_KHR_present_id, VK_KHR_present_wait and VK_KHR_shader_subgroup_uniform_control_flow extensions were implemented.
- Added the "–no-peermem" command line option to nvidia-installer to disable installation of the nvidia-peermem kernel module.
- Support for NvIFROpenGL was removed and the libnvidia-cbl.so library was removed, which is now shipped in a separate package, rather than as part of the driver.
- Fixed an issue that caused the X server to crash when starting a new server with PRIME technology.
- Support for GeForce 700, GeForce 600, GeForce 600M, Quadro NVS 510, Quadro K600, Quadro K4xx, and GRID K520 series has been removed.
Finally if you want to know more about it About releasing this new version of the drivers, you can check the following link.
How to install NVIDIA drivers on Ubuntu and derivatives?
To install this driver we are going to go to the following link where we will download it.
Note: before carrying out any process it is important that you check the compatibility of this new driver with the configuration of your equipment (system, kernel, linux-headers, Xorg version).
Since if not, you can end up with a black screen and at no time we are responsible for it since it is your decision to do it or not.
Download now let's proceed to create a blacklist to avoid conflict with the nouveau free drivers:
sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf
And in it we are going to add the following.
blacklist nouveau blacklist lbm-nouveau options nouveau modeset=0 alias nouveau off alias lbm-nouveau off
Done this now we are going to restart our system so that the blacklist comes into effect.
After restarting the system, now we are going to stop the graphical server (graphical interface) with:
sudo init 3
In case you have a black screen at startup or if you stopped the graphical server, now we are going to access a TTY by typing the following key configuration "Ctrl + Alt + F1".
If you already have a previous version, It is recommended that you carry out the uninstallation to avoid possible conflicts:
We just have to execute the following command:
sudo apt-get purge nvidia *
And now is the time to perform the installation, for this we are going to give execution permissions with:
sudo chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux*.run
And we execute with:
sh NVIDIA-Linux-*.run
At the end of the installation you will only have to restart your computer so that all the changes load at startup.