14 DAY TRIAL // Nvidia has just announced the immediate availability for download of the a new certified version of its graphics driver for Linux operating systems.
The new Linux display driver, 331.13 Beta, is one of the biggest and most important driver updates released this year, at least.
The Linux community is now witnessing the rise of two different alternatives for the X display server, Wayland and Mir. There’s even a minor “conflict” between the fans and the developers of both solutions.
Nvidia’s driver releases have been focusing so far on the X server, but both Wayland and Mir need official support from the GPU manufacturer.
As the changelog indicates for Nvidia 331.13 Beta drivers, support has been added for the EGL API on 32-bit platforms. Currently, the supported client APIs are OpenGL ES 1.1, 2.0 and 3.0, and the only supported window system backend is X11.
This is not exactly Mir and Wayland support and it’s limited to the 32-bit platform, but it signals that the talks between Nvidia and Canonical regarding Mir support in upcoming Linux drivers have not been in vain.
Nvidia also added support for multiple NVIDIA kernel modules. “This feature allows users to assign different GPUs in the system to different NVIDIA kernel modules, potentially reducing the software overhead of coordinating access to multiple GPUsm,” reads the official announcement.
Besides a host of new options and features, Nvidia also managed to update the installer to only install the libraries libvdpau and libvdpau_trace, if an existing installation of libvdpau was not detected on the system.
The newest desktop-oriented Nvidia GPU supported by these drivers is the GTX 780M and the oldest is GeForce 8800 GTX, which was launched back in 2006. Anything older than this and you will have to download the Legacy version of the driver.
Check out the changelog for a complete list of fixes and improvements.
Download Nvidia Linux Display Driver 331.13 Beta for Linux 32-bit and 64-bit
Downlonad Download Nvidia Display Driver 331.13 Beta for FreeBSD
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