NVIDIA has released Linux x64 Display Driver 610.43, a new Linux 64-bit graphics driver update that adds Vulkan, Wayland, DRM, and display-related changes, alongside several game and regression fixes.
The release adds support for three Vulkan extensions: VK_EXT_shader_long_vector, VK_KHR_internally_synchronized_queues, and VK_NV_push_constant_bank. It also supports creating Vulkan logical devices from multiple physical devices on select cards through VK_KHR_device_group_creation. This feature is disabled by default and requires setting the __VK_ENABLE_DEVICE_GROUPS=1 environment variable.
Gaming fixes include performance regression in Doom: The Dark Ages introduced in the 590 driver series. Starfield also gets performance improvements with this release.
On the Wayland side, NVIDIA 610.43 adds support for FP16 EGL framebuffer configurations and DRM format modifiers for multiplanar YCbCr formats. The driver also adds mmap support on DMABUF file descriptors from discrete NVIDIA GPUs.
A notable Linux graphics stack change is support in the nvidia-drm kernel module for the per-plane DRM color pipeline API introduced in Linux 6.19. This lets Wayland compositors offload color management, including HDR handling, to NVIDIA display hardware through the upstream COLOR_PIPELINE plane property and associated color operations, instead of NVIDIA’s previous vendor-specific color properties.
However, NVIDIA notes some Wayland compositors may not correctly handle color pipelines with non-bypassable color operations. This can cause a blank screen, including when enabling system HDR. To fix this, the company added a new color_pipeline kernel module parameter to nvidia-drm, letting users disable DRM color pipeline support as a workaround.
The release also removes support for using the NVIDIA X11 driver with Xinerama, an older X11 extension that combines multiple physical displays into one large desktop.
NVIDIA 610.43 also fixes display mode regressions from earlier driver releases. A regression introduced in 580.65 that caused some mode timings, such as 1920×1080 at 75 Hz, to disappear has been fixed. NVIDIA also reverted a change from 580.105.08 that invalidated display modes on several monitors.
For a complete list of changes, visit the release notes. NVIDIA Linux x64 Display Driver 610.43 is available now for Linux 64-bit systems as a 461 MB download from NVIDIA’s driver portal.
