The developers are implementing some new features into the Linux driver

Aug 6, 2014 22:15 GMT  ·  By

NVIDIA has just announced that a new version of its Beta driver for the Linux platform, 343.13, has been released and is ready for download and testing.

The new driver from NVIDIA doesn't feature anything out of the ordinary, but the developers have made a series of changes and improvements, which should translate in better support and performance.

Unlike the Windows platform, NVIDIA has several branches for Linux and they are designed for various users, which have either older or newer graphics cards. The developers usually promote a very stable release that makes it into most of the repositories, a short-lived version, which gathers most of the new changes, and a Beta release, which serves as a playground.

According to the changelog, a bug that caused disabled displays to be implicitly included in the target selection for some queries and assignments on the nvidia-settings command line interface has been fixed, a new attribute has been added to the NV-CONTROL API to query the current utilization of the video decode engine, a bug where the Exchange Stereo Eyes setting in nvidia-settings didn't work in certain stereo configurations has been corrected, and a workaround has been implemented for a Unigine Heaven 3.0 shader bug that could cause corruption when tessellation was enabled by implementing an application profile.

Also, a memory leak that occurred when destroying EGL surfaces has been fixed, support has been added for multiple simultaneous EGL displays, the support for G8x, G9x, and GT2xx GPUs has been removed, along with all the motherboard chipsets based on them, and a bug that could cause nvidia-installer to unsuccessfully attempt to delete the directory containing precompiled kernel module interface has been fixed.

Interestingly enough, NVIDIA is also working on a way to remove the previous driver installations with the intelligent use of the logs, which will now be kept separately.

Unfortunately, this is just the Beta and it will take a while to get these features into the stable release, but that's just a matter of time.

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 343.13 for Linux 32-bit and 64-bit. Keep in mind that you will need to manually install the drivers on your system.

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