Nvidia Says Steam for Linux Opens Today, Releases Drivers

Nvidia has just announced the release of their latest NVIDIA GeForce drivers, R310, and accidentally revealed the launch date of Steam for Linux, before Valve.

According to Nvidia, the new drivers double the performance and dramatically reduce game loading times for those gaming on the Linux operating system.

The GeForce R310 drivers are the result of the work and collaboration between NVIDIA, Valve and other game developers, in an effort to showcase the enormous potential of the world's biggest open-source operating system.

Nvidia stated that the new drivers were thoroughly tested with Steam for Linux, the digital distribution platform from Valve, which “officially opened to gamers starting today.”

This may come as a surprise for Valve, because they have yet to make an official announcement.

"With this release, NVIDIA has managed to increase the overall gaming performance under Linux," said Doug Lombardi, vice president of marketing at Valve.

"NVIDIA took an unquestioned leadership position developing R310 drivers with us and other studios to provide an absolutely unequalled solution for Linux gamers," he continued.

Highlights of Geforce 304.64 drivers:

• Support for VGX K1 and VGX K2 GPUs has been added;
• A regression in backlight control functionality on some notebook configurations has been fixed;
• A performance issue with recent Linux kernels when allocating and freeing system memory has been repaired;
• A bug that sometimes prevented the display device / X screen selection menu from being displayed in Nvidia-settings has been fixed;
• A bug that prevented X driver gamma manipulation from working after a VT-switch on some configurations has been fixed;
• A hang which happened when using OpenGL programs with some SLI Mosaic configurations on pre-Fermi GPUs has been fixed;
• Sections to the "Supported NVIDIA GPU Products" list for NVS, Tesla, and VGX products have been added.

Check out the complete changelog for a complete list of bug fixes and updates.

Download Nvidia Display Driver 304.64 for Linux 32-bit.

Download Nvidia Display Driver 304.64 for Linux 64-bit.

Download Nvidia Display Driver 304.64 for FreeBSD.

Download Nvidia Display Driver 304.64 for Solaris.