Although most games (especially triple A) are only available for Windows, more and more developers decide to release their titles for Linux as well. After all, unless very specific APIs are used, porting a game from one system to another does not involve much more than a couple of clicks on the engine. On more than one occasion, Linux has proven to outperform Windows when running some games. And now, thanks to this new version of the NVIDIA driver , we will even be able to enjoy the latest in technology: Ray Tracing.
Ray tracing, or Ray Tracing , began as a proprietary technology of NVIDIA graphics (the RTX series) that offered tracing and reflection of rays and light beams in real time thanks to a series of dedicated processors included in the graphics themselves. However, right now it is possible to do this using software, which opens up a world of possibilities for this technology.
The next-generation consoles, PS5 and Xbox Series X / S, have their own software ray tracing system. DirectX, in Windows, is also experimenting with its own scratch tracing system. And finally, Linux is also able to work with this technology thanks to Vulkan .
NVIDIA 460.32.03 Drivers Bring Ray Tracing to Linux
Undoubtedly, the main novelty of these drivers is that, finally, the necessary extensions have been included to be able to make use of the Vulkan Ray Tracing API . These extensions have been in the beta version of the NVIDIA driver for a while, but are now available to everyone.
All users who install this new version will already be able to enjoy this technology, both when working with when carrying out certain design and rendering projects with tools such as Blender , Unreal or Unity, among others.
Of course, in order to enjoy this technology in games, it is necessary for the developers to implement it, and for Valve to help bring the game to Linux through Steam. We have the technology, what we lack are games that really work with it.
Other important changes
In addition to the long-awaited official Ray Tracing support for Vulkan, the new version of the NVIDIA graphics drivers also brings other important improvements and fixes. For starters, it fixes various compatibility issues with Kernel 5.9 that were causing unexpected system crashes. A number of crashes have also been addressed when generating high I / O activity on the system.
Some other important fixes for games have also been included, such as for Cyberpunk 2077 . And furthermore, the shadow cache has been increased to 1024MB and assigned a new location.
Now it just depends on the distro repositories to be able to automatically receive these drivers. Users of Rolling Release systems, such as Arch Linux, can now download and install the new NVIDIA drivers . The rest of the distros will have to wait, unless we have enough knowledge, and cold blood, to download and install them manually on our system.