NVIDIA released 595.104.02 on September 23, a small maintenance update to its 595 production branch a month after 595.99.02. It carries two fixes, and one of them matters for anyone running HDR on Wayland.

The fixes

Wayland HDR crash. Vulkan applications can attach HDR metadata to what they render through VkHdrMetadataEXT: the mastering display’s luminance, the content’s maximum brightness, and so on. The driver was forwarding those values to the Wayland color-management-v1 protocol without validating them, and invalid values could crash the session. The driver now validates them first.

That is a very 2026 bug. The color-management protocol is new, HDR on Linux desktops only became practical in the last couple of years, and games write HDR metadata with varying degrees of care. Validation at the boundary is exactly the right fix.

Large page table allocations. Allocating GPU page tables larger than 2 GiB (INT_MAX bytes) failed. That is mostly a compute and very-large-memory problem rather than a gaming one, but on current high-memory GPUs it is reachable.

Which branch should you run?

Branch	Purpose
595 (this release)	Production, stability-focused. Fixes only
615	Newer features: additional Vulkan extensions and better Blackwell GPU support

If your system works, 595 is the conservative choice and this update is worth taking. If you have a Blackwell card or need newer Vulkan extensions for a specific game, 615 is where that work is happening.

Supported platforms remain 64-bit x86 and AArch64 Linux, plus FreeBSD and Solaris.

Installing

Use your distribution’s packages rather than the .run installer where you can. Distro packages rebuild the kernel module through DKMS on each kernel update and handle Secure Boot signing, both of which the .run file leaves to you. Our NVIDIA drivers on Linux guide covers each major distro, and DKMS explained covers what happens when a kernel update and a driver update collide.