14 DAY TRIAL // A fresh NVIDIA driver for the Linux platform has been released and it looks like the devs have made a number of changes and important improvements that really stand out.
NVIDIA seems to be the only company that takes the Linux community seriously, or least this can be deduced from the changelogs and the number of drivers that are released for the platform. AMD and Intel do their share of work with the kernel, but it's nowhere near the kind of dedication that NVIDIA has. The simple fact that they release often is proof that they really do care about their users.
The previous Beta released was also a major one and it brought a huge number of fixes and new features. For example, the VP8 video streams are now played through the NVIDIA GPU, GTK+ 3.x support was added for the NVIDIA settings, and the limit on the maximum number of OpenGL Framebuffer Objects was removed.
The current release is not as important as the previous one, but it does bring a number of fixes for some important apps, like Unreal 4 for example.
NVIDIA drivers are important and they should be installed as soon as possible
Users might be tempted to install the new Beta driver and it should work without any issues, but this is still in development and there is no guarantee that you won't mess up the system.
If you don't have any particular problems with the current set of drivers you're using, there is no need to get the Beta. On the other hand, if you are not satisfied with the performance of your drivers, it is not a bad idea to get this new stable release.
One of the most important improvements is the support for the xorg-server 1.17 and for the most recent kernels (although they are not mentioned explicitly). Another thing that really stands out is the fix for the Unreal 4 games, which is still under development.
"Fixed a bug that rendered very bright garbage data onto some textures in UnrealEngine 4 applications. This issue is known as the "disco bug" by the UnrealEngine 4 Linux community. Fixed a crash with UnrealEngine 4 when the application was started with the -opengl4 commandline switch," reads the official changelog.
A number of other bugs have been corrected as well. Users who want to install the new drivers will have to do it manually, which might create some problems with new kernel updates. It's possible that users might have to manually compile the headers for the NVIDIA driver, after they reboot from a kernel upgrade.
You can download NVIDIA Linux Display Driver 343.36 for Linux 32-bit and 64-bit. Also, check this article to find out how you can manually install the NVIDIA drivers.
