NVIDIA today issued the 580.94.11 driver release as their newest Vulkan beta driver for Linux customers. Most notable with this beta driver update is adding VK_EXT_hdr_metadata support.
The NVIDIA Windows driver has supported the VK_EXT_hdr_metadata extension (all the way back to 2018) and the open-source Mesa Linux drivers also supported this HDR metadata extension while only now is being enabled by the NVIDIA Linux driver. VK_EXT_hdr_metadata is used for dealing with SMPTE 2086 metadata and CATA 861.3 metadata for Vulkan swapchains.
The VK_EXT_hdr_metadata extension dates back to the Vulkan 1.0 days in 2017. This extension in turn is already used by Wine and other applications. The VK_EXT_hdr_metadata extension only works under Wayland and not X.Org/X11.
In addition to enabling VK_EXT_hdr_metadata for the NVIDIA 580.94.11 Linux driver, today’s beta driver update also brings some minor VK_EXT_present_timing improvements for Linux users plus some performance improvements to vkCmdWriteTimestamp under some circumstances.
The updated NVIDIA Linux Vulkan driver beta can be downloaded from developer.nvidia.com.
