A new short-lived NVIDIA driver for Linux is now available for download

Mar 5, 2014 07:40 GMT  ·  By

NVIDIA has just announced the immediate availability for download of a new Beta version of its graphics driver for Linux operating systems, 334.21, which arrives just in time to provide much needed support for a number of new GPUs.

The new Linux display driver, 334.21, has been released mostly to provide support for the new GeForce GTX 750 Ti, GeForce GTX 750, GeForce GTX 745, and GeForce GTX TITAN Black.

Besides the large number of supported GPUs, the developers have also implemented quite a few fixes and have repaired a lot of outstanding issues.

The first fix on the list is for a regression in the NVIDIA kernel module that caused it to improperly dereference a userspace pointer. This was a security issue and it was initially reported on the grsecurity forums. According to the developers, this particular regression did not affect NVIDIA GPU drivers before release 334.x.

Also, a bug that could cause OpenGL programs to hang after calling fork(2) has been corrected, a bug that could cause a multi-threaded OpenGL application to crash has been fixed, VDPAU now supports more robust decode error handling (it will have a small performance impact, but nothing too significant), GPUs with VDPAU Feature Set E are now supported, and application profile rule patterns are now supported (if they are logical operations of subpatterns).

Another major improvement that has been implemented in this driver is for OpenGL performance, a change that has been expected for some time.

“Improved performance of OpenGL applications when used in conjunction with the X driver's composition pipeline. The composition pipeline may be explicitly enabled by using the ForceCompositionPipeline or ForceFullCompositionPipeline MetaMode options, or implicitly enabled when certain features such as some XRandR transformations, rotation,Warp & Blend, PRIME, and NvFBC are used,” reads the official changelog.

The developers have also added 64-bit EGL and OpenGL ES libraries to the 64-bit driver package, fixed a bug in the GLX_EXT_buffer_age extension, repaired a bug that caused high pixelclock HDMI modes (particularly useful if you have a 4K display), and more.

This is the short-lived version of the driver, which means that it will soon be replaced by another, more advanced version. NVIDIA is no longer calling these Betas, but they should be treated as such.

Check out the changelog for a complete list of fixes and improvements. Download NVIDIA Linux Display Driver 334.21 from Softpedia.

Remember that this is a short-lived version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.