The overclocking can damage your video card, so you must use it with care

Apr 9, 2014 06:41 GMT  ·  By

NVIDIA has just announced the immediate availability for download of a new Beta version of its graphics driver for Linux operating systems, 337.12.

The new Linux display driver, 337.12 Beta, is somewhat of an odd release. NVIDIA doesn't usually publish Beta versions of its drivers, so the developers make it available in the short-lived branch. Nonetheless, a new major update has been released and comes with a quite a few changes and improvements.

Windows users get this sort of treatment, which is a stable and a Beta version. We can only hope that NVIDIA will continue on the same path with the Linux branches that are already being maintained.

One of the most important reasons for this upgrade is the support for the new GPU: GeForce 830M, GeForce 840M, GeForce 845M, GeForce GTX 850M, GeForce GTX 860M, GeForce GTX 870M, GeForce GTX 880M, GeForce GT 705, and GeForce GT 720.

As usual, quite a few fixes made their way into the release. The developers from NVIDIA couldn't pass the opportunity to also implement some important changes. For example, a bug that could cause OpenGL programs to freeze under some low memory conditions has been fixed, the configuration page in nvidia-settings has been updated so that it can uniquely identify the DisplayPort 1.2 monitors, and a bug that could cause ECC settings to be displayed incorrectly in nvidia-settings has been fixed.

Also, the color correction settings page in the nvidia-settings control panel has been updated, a bug that prevented the use of multiple simultaneous X servers on UEFI systems has been corrected, the minimum required version of GTK+ has been updated from 2.2 to 2.4 for nvidia-settings, and the CPU utilization and GPU memory utilization of the NVIDIA EGL driver.

It's also very important to note that this is the first driver from NVIDIA that features the ability to overclock and underclock certain GeForce GPUs in the GeForce GTX 400 series and later.

“For GPUs that allow it, an offset can be applied to clock values in some clock domains of some performance levels. This clock manipulation is done at the user's own risk,” reads the official changelog.

It will be a while before this version hits the repositories. Until then, you will need to install the driver manually. You can use our tutorial on how to manually install an NVIDIA driver.

Check out the changelog for a complete list of fixes and improvements. Download NVIDIA Linux Display Driver 337.12 Beta from the official website.

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