14 DAY TRIAL // The San Thomas, Santa Clara- based NVIDIA Corporation is one of the most well known producers of GPU technologies for video cards, graphic cards, workstations, desktop computers, handhelds and other similar stuff. Some of NVIDIA's most popular product lines would be the GeForce series, the Quadro series as well as the nForce series.
Another aspect NVIDIA is known for is that it does not provide the documentation for their hardware, which is necessary in order for programmers to write appropriate and effective open source drivers for NVIDIA's products but provides instead their own binary GeForce graphics drivers for X.Org and a thin open-source library that interfaces with the Linux, FreeBSD or Solaris kernels and the proprietary graphics software.
Recently, NVIDIA made available its 100.14.09 stable driver, which comes with a lot of product support. For example I could count here the support for the:
- GeForce 8600 GT - GeForce 8600M GT - GeForce 8600M GS - GeForce 8500 GT - GeForce 8400 GS - GeForce 8400M GT - GeForce 8400M GS - GeForce 8400M G - GeForce 8300 GS - Quadro FX 1600M - Quadro FX 570M - Quadro FX 360M - Quadro NVS 320M - Quadro NVS 140M - Quadro NVS 135M - Quadro NVS 130M
On the changelog of the new release there are also some other features and improvements brought which are also worth mentioned, such as:
- Added support for Quadro FX 4600 G-Sync and Quadro FX 5600 G-Sync boards - Improvement in the notebook GPU support - Improved RenderAccel support for subpixel antialiased fonts - Added XV brightness and contrast controls for GeForce 8 GPUs - Fixed a locale-interaction issue in the nvidia-settings configuration file parser
One of the good news the driver brings to the Linux users would be that it benefits now of an improved interaction with the newer Linux kernels. Officially, the driver should be able work on the Linux 2.6.21 kernel and even on the 2.6.22 release candidates. Unfortunately for the Beryl/Compiz users, the new driver cannot fix an older black window bug.