• NVIDIA 620: the kernel driver now runs NVIDIA's 620.70.06 open kernel modules (was 615.78.08) with their GPU firmware. Two new cards come with it: RTX PRO 5500 Blackwell and RTX Spark N1X (249 device ids in all).
• NVIDIA 620: the CPU mapping hardening from 2.7.2 is carried over to 620's new mapping model. A system-memory mapping is now limited to the length the driver validated, tied to that mapping and its list, and a re-bind or close can no longer leave a mapping behind.
• NVIDIA 620: the display driver leaves the colour format to NVIDIA's modesetting, so a display mode that offers only YCbCr no longer comes up black.
• If /Library is not mounted yet when the driver starts, it loads its GPU firmware from a fallback copy.
• DLSS 4 / 4.5 (optional, RTX 20 series and newer): DLSS Super Resolution runs behind the MetalFX temporal upscaler, so a Mac game that uses MetalFX upscaling gets DLSS on an NVIDIA card. DLSS Frame Generation runs behind the MetalFX frame interpolator and takes its sizes and the game's real motion vectors from the upscaler the game attached. DLSS Ray Reconstruction runs behind the MetalFX denoised upscaler on macOS 26.
• DLSS files: the package carries no NVIDIA DLSS code. With the optional step on, the installer downloads NVIDIA's own files on your Mac, refuses any file whose SHA-256 differs from the pinned one, and compiles the DLSS GPU kernels for your card (about two minutes). Run it with sudo env NULLMOTH_DLSS=1 ./install.sh. RTX 20, 30, 40 and 50 series cards are covered. DLSS never runs inside WindowServer, and its data stays in a private per-user folder.
• Metal 4: command queues, command buffers, encoders, argument tables and the Metal 4 compiler work over the driver's Metal 3 objects, and the device reports the Metal 4 GPU family. MetalFX's Metal 4 upscaler and frame interpolator are served by DLSS.
• Games with ray tracing and frame generation no longer run out of video memory and crash: large automatic heaps (256 MB and up) get memory in 64 MB pieces as they are used instead of all at once. A 2 GB heap the game had made held 22 KB of data.
• Freezes in long game sessions are gone: freeing or reusing an image no longer scans every image the app ever made (hash index).
• A texture copy between two size-compatible formats is performed, as Metal allows, instead of being refused.
• Drawing into an attachment whose channel order differs from the pipeline's (BGRA into RGBA) works the way it does on Apple GPUs.
• Resources in a heap stay alive until the GPU work that uses them has finished.
• Less CPU time per draw: parallel render encoders record strided vertex buffers and heaps directly, and a buffer's GPU address is returned without a lock when it is already known.
• Fewer stalls: the Vulkan layer carves command memory from shared 1 MB slabs and reuses it across command pools instead of opening a kernel connection per pool.
• Ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077: the game offers ray tracing only when the reported working set is above 6145 MB. On a card with at least 7.2 GB of memory the driver answers 6200 MB while ray tracing is available; a smaller card keeps its own answer, so it is never told it holds more than it has.
• Cyberpunk 2077 (ARM apps translation) is told macOS 27 so it offers MetalFX frame generation, which the driver provides on macOS 15 and 26. Measured on an RTX 5060 at 1080p, all ray tracing on, DLSS upscaling and frame generation: 85.84 fps average, 68.18 fps minimum (was a crash, or about 47 fps without ray tracing in 2.7.2). Geekbench 7 Metal on the same card: 116,053.
• Shaders: an atomic on an unindexed local array works, and translation is faster (each shader is parsed once).
• Managed no-copy buffers of every size get a copy in video memory.
• OpenGL: the uniform buffer reads its slot through the handle check.
• If Cyberpunk 2077 had ray tracing or frame generation greyed out or off before, turn Ray Tracing and Frame Generation back on once in its graphics settings: the game remembers its own earlier answer.
• Known issue: some interiors in Cyberpunk 2077 can render too bright on the first launch after a restart. Quit and launch again. A fix is planned for 2.8.1.