A new driver update can now be downloaded from Softpedia

May 30, 2014 20:52 GMT  ·  By

NVIDIA has just announced that a new version of its Short Lived Branch driver for the Linux platform, 337.25, has been released and is ready for download.

The new driver from NVIDIA is quite an impressive one and it covers some new GPU models and numerous bug fixes for various issues and bugs.

NVIDIA has three distinct driver versions that are aimed at various users and products, but this Short Lived Branch is the most updated one. This is where the NVIDIA developers make the first updates for their products and it's also the version that receives improvements for games and applications.

Most likely, this particular branch of the NVIDIA driver won't reach the official repositories for the major distributions (with the exception of Arch Linux) until the next version is already out the door.

The new supported GPUs are GeForce GTX TITAN Z, GeForce GT 740, GeForce 830M, GeForce 840M, GeForce 845M, and GeForce GTX 850M,

According to the changelog a bug that caused X to crash when querying clock offsets for non-existent performance levels has been fixed, a performance regression when running KDE with desktop effects using the OpenGL compositing backend has been corrected, a bug that caused duplicate entries to appear in some dropdown menus in the "Application Profiles" page of nvidia-settings has been fixed, and a regression that could cause OpenGL rendering corruption on X screens with 30 bit per pixel color has been fixed as well.

Also, a bug that was causing mode validation to fail for 4K resolutions over HDMI in certain situations has been repaired, several cosmetic issues in the clock control user interface of nvidia-settings have been implemented, a bug that could cause OpenGL programs to freeze under some low memory conditions has been fixed, a bug that caused GPU errors when hotplugging daisy-chained DisplayPort 1.2 displays has been fixed, and the minimum required version of GTK+ has been raised from 2.2 to 2.4 for nvidia-settings.

The NVIDIA developers provide a single binary file that should work on most Linux distributions out there, but installing it might require a little bit of expertise. You can also wait for this particular driver to arrive in the official repositories.

Check out the announcement for a complete list of fixes and improvements. You can download NVIDIA Linux Display Driver 337.25 for Linux 32-bit and 64-bit. Keep in mind that you will need to manually install the drivers on your system.