New Nvidia Video Driver Brings GeForce 8 Improvements

Another month, another Nvidia driver... as last night Nvidia announced the release of yet another new and improved video driver for Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris systems. In this version, we can notice some very nice improvements to GeForce 8 GPUs, a bugfix for those of you who play Counter-Strike under Wine and more.

The highlists of this release are:

� Improved power management support with GeForce 8 GPUs.
� Further improved stability on some GeForce 8 GPUs.
� Fixed a bug that broke certain TwinView configurations with TV-OUT on GeForce 8 GPUs.
� Fixed a bug that could cause OpenGL to crash in certain cases, e.g. when running Counter-Strike under Wine.
� Further improved GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap out-of-memory handling.
� Fixed a bug that could result in incorrect PowerMizer state being reported.
� Improved nvidia-xconfig behavior when updating X configuration files without a "Module" section.
� Worked around a problem that caused function key presses on some Toshiba notebooks to result in system crashes.

As you can see, this new driver fixes another important bug which caused a crash, if the GLX extension module was loaded instead of NVIDIA's one. Moreover, the brightness control for HP Compaq laptops is fixed now.

How to install?

Log out of your current session and hit CTRL+ALT+F1 key combination, in order to enter a text mode session. Log in as root (System Administrator), go to the folder where you've downloaded the Nvidia driver installer and type:

sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-169.09-pkg1.run (or NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-169.12-pkg2.run for AMD64/EM64T users)

Then, follow the on-screen instructions to install the video driver.

I guess Nvidia made some Linux users (read: GeForce 8 users) happy with this driver which will let them fully enjoy their video cards capabilities.

Download the NVidia display driver for IA32 architecture right now from Softpedia.

Download the NVidia display driver for AMD64/EM64T architecture right now from Softpedia.

FreeBSD users can also download the NVidia display driver right now from Softpedia.