A new NVIDIA Beta driver is now ready for download

Nov 14, 2014 09:35 GMT  ·  By

A new NVIDIA Beta Linux driver has been released, and this is one of the biggest updates in a long time. It's considered unstable, but if you're having problems with the system or you want better performance, then you really need to try this one.

NVIDIA has a number of branches that are maintained constantly, but the Beta is not really among them. All regular updates arrive either for the Long Lived Branch, for the Short Lived Branch, or for the Legacy drivers. The NVIDIA Beta drivers are not all that common, but they usually bring a ton of improvements and the current 346.16 Beta release is more than interesting.

The other branches of the NVIDIA drivers have the merit of being much more stable, but they don't pack the same amount of improvements. That is one of the reasons why you probably won't find the current Beta in most repositories out there, with the exception of Arch Linux, although it's not a guarantee. In any case, such an important update for the drivers will surely be noticed by the community.

What's new in the NVIDIA 346.16 Beta Linux driver

There are so many improvements in the driver that it's hard to pick out the most important ones. For example, the VP8 video streams (usually found in Internet browsers) are now played through the NVIDIA GPU, the nvidia-settings is now capable to take advantage of GTK+ 3.x, the performance of nvidia-installer has been increased measurably, and the limit on the maximum number of OpenGL Framebuffer Objects has been removed.

"Updated nvidia-settings to take advantage of GTK+ 3, when available. This is implemented by building the nvidia-settings user interface into separate shared libraries (libnvidia-gtk2.so, libnvidia-gtk3.so), and loading the correct one at run-time. Added the nvidia-settings option --gtk-library to allow specifying the path of the directory containing the user interface library or the path and filename of the specific library to use," reads the official announcement.

How to manually install NVIDIA drivers

This is a Beta release, so it's unlikely that it will ever arrive in repos, so users need to install it manually. We tested the installation on Ubuntu 14.10 and it went smoothly. Open a full screen virtual terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + F1, log in with your user name and password, and enter these commands (after navigating to the folder where the file is located):

code
sudo service lightdm stop
sudo chmod a+x NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-346.16.run
sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-346.16.run
Reboot the computer when you're done and voila, you now have the latest NVIDIA drivers. You can download NVIDIA Linux Display Driver 346.16 Beta for Linux 32-bit and 64-bit.

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