NVIDIA 595.104.02 Fixes Linux Wayland HDR Crash

NVIDIA released Linux display driver 595.104.02 on September 22, 2026 as a small maintenance update to its 595 production branch. The official release notes list two fixes: a failure when allocating GPU page tables larger than 2 GiB, and a crash path involving invalid Vulkan HDR metadata passed into Wayland color management.

This is not a feature release or a gaming-performance update. Its value is narrower: it removes two failure modes that can matter on large GPU workloads and modern Wayland HDR desktops, while keeping users on NVIDIA’s stability-oriented production branch.

NVIDIA says unvalidated VkHdrMetadataEXT values could be forwarded to the Wayland color-management-v1 protocol and cause a crash. VkHdrMetadataEXT is the Vulkan structure applications use to describe HDR display metadata, including mastering-display color information and luminance-related values.

The important scope is that NVIDIA describes a crash caused by bad metadata reaching the Wayland color-management path. The release notes do not claim a general HDR performance improvement, wider HDR compatibility, or a security vulnerability, so those conclusions should not be inferred from this fix.

The other release-note item fixes a failure that could occur when GPU page-table allocations exceeded 2 GiB, identified by NVIDIA with the INT_MAX boundary. GPU page tables are part of the virtual-memory machinery used to map GPU virtual addresses to backing memory; the fix concerns the size of those page-table allocations, not a new 2 GiB VRAM limit for applications.

That distinction matters on high-memory and compute-oriented systems. A page-table allocation exceeding 2 GiB is an unusual scale for ordinary desktop use, but failure at that boundary can become relevant as GPU address spaces and workloads grow. NVIDIA does not provide workload-specific benchmarks or a list of applications known to have triggered the problem, so the practical impact should not be overstated.

NVIDIA’s open GPU kernel module releases show 595.104.02 alongside the newer 615 series. The 595 update is therefore useful for systems intentionally staying on the production branch rather than moving to the newer feature branch simply to obtain these stability fixes.

For most distribution-managed installations, NVIDIA itself notes that the distribution’s native driver package may integrate better with the rest of the system. That means the practical update path is usually to wait for or install the packaged 595.104.02 update from the distribution rather than replacing a working packaged driver with NVIDIA’s standalone installer.