NVIDIA 615.78.08 Linux Driver Cuts vkd3d-proton Latency and Fixes a Wayland HDR Crash

NVIDIA 615.78.08 Linux Driver Cuts vkd3d-proton Latency and Fixes a Wayland HDR Crash

By Our editorial standards

NVIDIA released the 615.78.08 Linux driver on October 7, a new feature branch update, about a month after 595.104.02 on the production branch.

Changes

  • VK_NV_low_latency2 revision 3, which NVIDIA says reduces latency and stutter with vkd3d-proton, the layer Proton uses for Direct3D 12 games, especially with frame generation enabled
  • A fix for blocky corruption in The Last of Us Part II
  • A fix for a possible crash caused by unvalidated HDR metadata sent through the Wayland colour-management protocol
  • nvidia.ko now avoids a conflict with some SELinux setups during systemd suspend, and NVreg_UseKernelSuspendNotifiers=1 is now the default
  • Allocating GPU page tables larger than 2GiB no longer fails

Should you upgrade?

Feature-branch drivers get new features first; production-branch drivers get longer support. If you game through Proton, especially DX12 titles, this one is worth trying. If your system is stable and you are not chasing a specific fix, waiting for your distribution’s packaged update is the safer path.

Our NVIDIA drivers on Linux guide covers installing through your package manager versus NVIDIA’s .run installer, and why the package manager is usually the better choice.

More news

NVIDIA 595.104.02 Fixes a Wayland HDR Crash and Large GPU Page Table AllocationsA maintenance update to NVIDIA's 595 production branch stops invalid HDR metadata from crashing Wayland color management and fixes page table allocations over 2 GiB. New features live in the 615 branch.Wine 11.18 Expands NTOSKRNL Support for Windows Kernel DriversWine 11.18 improves its emulation of the Windows kernel interface, which is the layer that decides whether software depending on a kernel driver can run at all.DXVK 3.1.1 Fixes Skyrim Special Edition, Rayman 3, and MoreA point release addressing specific game issues in Skyrim SE, Rayman 3, Call of Duty Ghosts, Painkiller, and Corpse Party, which is how Linux gaming compatibility actually advances.

Background reading

Explainers for the concepts behind this story.

D-Bus Explained, and Why Distributions Are Switching to dbus-brokerD-Bus is the message bus Linux desktops and system services use to talk to each other. What it does, the system and session buses, how to inspect it with busctl, and why Fedora, Arch, and now Ubuntu replaced dbus-daemon with dbus-broker.Moving to Wayland on KDE Plasma: What Breaks and How to Fix ItPlasma 6.8 removed the X11 session, so every Plasma user is moving to Wayland. The common problems, from screen sharing and xdotool to global shortcuts, blurry apps, NVIDIA, and remote desktop, and how to solve each one.AMD GPUs on Linux: amdgpu, Mesa, Vulkan, and ROCm ExplainedAMD graphics work out of the box on Linux with fully open source drivers. How the amdgpu kernel driver and Mesa fit together, getting the newest Mesa, Vulkan with RADV, video acceleration, monitoring and fan control, and ROCm for compute and AI.