The LuxCoreRender open-source physically based rendering (PBR) software is out with its latest major feature release that now offers NVIDIA OptiX/RTX acceleration support alongside the existing CPU, NVIDIA CUDA, and OpenCL rendering paths.

LuxCoreRender 2.5 now allows making use of NVIDIA OptiX/RTX acceleration when running with a supported graphics card on the NVIDIA proprietary driver stack. LuxCoreRender 2.5 also has an OptiX denoiser image pipeline plugin.

LuxCoreRender 2.5 also adds a number of other new features and improvements to its renderer

It's been another week of fixes and feature work for the KDE desktop as the march continues toward the Plasma 5.22 release this summer.

Crash fixes and more Wayland improvements remain the common theme for KDE this year. Over the past week some of the work items that landed included:

- The KDE Activities feature now "mostly works" on Wayland. There still are more improvements to go but should be buttoned up for KDE Plasma 5.22.

- The font size can now be changed for

If your current Vulkan-based Radeon Linux gaming performance isn't cutting it and a new GPU is out of your budget or you have been unable to find a desired GPU upgrade in stock, the Mesa RADV driver has added an option likely of interest to you... Well, at least moving forward with this feature being limited to RDNA2 GPUs for now.

RADV as Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver has added an option to allow Variable Rate Shading (VRS) via an environment variable override. This RADV

Wine 6.6 is out as the open-source project's first release of April for running Windows games and applications primarily on Linux and macOS platforms. With Wine 6.6 comes more feature work that will ultimately be incorporated into the Wine 7.0 release due out in early 2022.

Wine 6.6 isn't a particularly big release but it does update its Mono engine against v6.1.1, the DWrite and DNSAPI libraries have been converted to portable executable (PE

The NVIDIA-led work to allow XWayland OpenGL and Vulkan acceleration with their proprietary driver has just been merged into X.Org Server Git.

The XWayland changes needed to allow the NVIDIA proprietary driver to work in an accelerated manner have landed in X.Org Server 1.21 Git. The main change is xwayland: implement pixmap_from_buffers for the eglstream backend that was merged just a few minutes ago.

Before getting too excited, this support is contingent upon a new NVIDIA proprietary driver release. That much

The upcoming release of Fedora 34 will make it the first major Linux distribution to have sevctl available, an open-source utility for managing AMD EPYC systems with Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV).

SEVCTL is a utility for managing AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization with displaying various SEV details, managing of certificates, resetting the platform's persistent state, and other features for what is exposed by the SEV management API with EPYC processors.

The latest open-source compiler infrastructure effort seeking to target a wide spectrum of devices from CPUs through GPUs, FPGAs, and accelerators is HPVM. The HPVM project today celebrated its 1.0 milestone.

Like most compiler projects these days, HPVM is based on the LLVM compiler stack. HPVM was also born at the University of Illinois where LLVM itself was first started. We covered the initial work on HPVM more than a year ago in University of Illinois Releases HPVM As Heterogeneous Parallel Systems Compiler .

HPVM uses a target-

FFmpeg 4.4 is out today as a large update to this widely-used multimedia library and with it comes many new features including new demuxers, AV1 support improvements, and other enhancements.

FFmpeg 4.4 includes a wide array of improvements over last year's FFmpeg 4.3 release. Among the exciting additions with FFmpeg 4.4 are:

- AudioToolbox output device support.

- VDPAU accelerated HEVC 10-bit and 12-bit decoding.

- VDPAU accelerated VP9 10-bit