The stable branch of the NVIDIA drivers has been updated

Jan 18, 2015 16:29 GMT  ·  By

A new stable NVIDIA driver has been released and the developers have made a series of very important improvements, implementing support for new video cards and Linux kernels.

Each new update for the NVIDIA drivers usually brings all kinds of fixes for various problems, but it doesn't usually provide improvements across the board. This latest NVIDIA 346.35 driver features practically everything the devs could cram in there, including support for new Linux kernels, support for a new X.org version, support for the latest video cards (including the ones for laptops), and even some new features.

The NVIDIA devs have a few branches that they maintained and this is what you can consider stable and the most likely to land in various repositories. There is also another branch that is short-lived and stable, which gets updated much more often, a Beta version that brings all the latest stuff, and a legacy one that brings minimum support for some of the older video cards.

It's hard to choose anything from the massive changelog of NVIDIA 346.35

Many of the NVIDIA drives are usually pretty unimpressive, although they do arrive with all sorts of fixes and changes, showing that the developers are closely watching what is happening in the Linux world. In fact, the NVIDIA CEO used an Ubuntu system for this presentation at CES 2015, a fact that didn't go unnoticed by the Linux fans.

Some of the more important changes include support for GeForce 800A, GeForce 800M, GeForce GTX 970M, and GeForce GTX 980M, support for X.Org 1.17, compatibility with some of the recent kernels, and numerous bugs have been corrected. They even went through all the trouble of making NVIDIA Setting take advantage of GTK3+, where available.

"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," is noted in the official announcement.

You can check the massive changelog posted by the NVIDIA devs and see if anything is useful for your particular configuration. Users can download NVIDIA 346.35 Linux drivers from Softpedia, for both the 32-bit and 64-bit architecture and give them a try. We also have a tutorial on how to install the driver in Ubuntu, if you don't want to wait around for the repositories.