NVIDIA Driver 550.54.14 Released with Better Wayland Support

NVIDIA announced the first stable release for 550 series Linux driver this Friday. It’s NVIDIA Driver 550.54.14 released as latest production branch version.

The release brings better support for Wayland, the more security touchscreen and HiDPI friendly display server, that’s already default in Ubuntu, Fedora, and other Linux with recent GNOME Desktop. They include:

• NVIDIA VDPAU driver for hardware video acceleration can run in XWayland.
• Support GNOME ‘Night Light’ and KDE ‘Night Color’ features on Wayland.
• Support for PRIME render offload to Vulkan Wayland WSI.
• Add support for virtual reality displays, such as the SteamVR platform, on Wayland compositors support DRM leasing.
• Fix Source 2 engine games hang on Wayland session.
• Fix that Wayland apps sometimes run at extreme low frame rate on Maxwell, Volta, and Pascal series GPUs.
• Fix VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) not working with Wayland.

In addition, NVIDIA 550.54.14 also added experimental support for HDMI 10 bits per component, which can be enabled by loading nvidia-modeset with hdmi_deepcolor=1.

It as well added initial experimental support for runtime D3 (RTD3) power management on Desktop GPUs, allowing to save power when being idle for a long time.

Other changes in the release include:

• Improve Plasma 5 Kwin performance on hybrid GPU systems
• Add support for R8, GR88 and YCbCr GBM formats.
• Add support for HDR signaling
• New extensions support:
  • EGL_ANDROID_native_fence_sync EGL,
  • VK_KHR_video_encode_queue,
  • VK_KHR_video_encode_h264,
  • VK_KHR_video_encode_h265,
  • and VK_KHR_video_maintenance1.
• Fix setting backlight brightness levels.
• Fix Xid errors on Hogwarts Legacy and Forza Horizon 4/5, Horizon Zero Dawn, Metro Exodus, and Halo Infinite.
• Fix flicker or blank issue on VRR displays

For more, see the official release note.

How to Install NVIDIA 550.54.14

The official .run installers for Linux are available to download at this page. It is however NOT RECOMMENDED for beginners!

For Ubuntu, the developer team will build the driver package. At that time, user can launch Additional Drivers to get the driver. If you can’t wait, then try adding the popular ‘Graphics Driver’ team PPA, then check in ‘Additional Drivers’ utility.