This is the short-lived branch of the Nvidia video driver

Sep 8, 2016 21:35 GMT  ·  By

Today, September 8, 2016, Nvidia has released a new short-lived graphics driver for Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems, including FreeBSD and Solaris, the Nvidia 370.28.

Looking at the release notes, we can notice that Nvidia 370.28 is here to add many fixes for bugs that have been reported by users since the last stable release, and it also looks like it contains the changes implemented during the Beta stages of development of the Nvidia 370.x graphics driver series.

Yes, that's right, Nvidia 370.x was in Beta until today, and now Nvidia has promoted it to the stable channel, but it's a short-lived branch, which means that it won't be supported for long until a new version sees the light of day, so our recommendation is to always stay on the long-lived branch of the Nvidia video driver.

What's new in Nvidia 370.28

As mentioned above, there are many fixes contained in today's Nvidia 370.28 graphics driver for Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris platforms, bringing better support for various Vulkan games like DOTA 2 or vkQuake, support for setting HDMI YUV 420 4K modes correctly on certain TVs, such as the VIZIO D40u-D1, and other small issues.

As for the new features, there's initial support for the PRIME Synchronization feature, which lets you synchronize flipping between an external PRIME display sink and an NVIDIA PRIME display source, and you can now overclock or underclock certain Nvidia GeForce GPUs from the GeForce GTX 1000 series or newer models.

"For GPUs that allow it, an offset can be applied to clock values in some clock domains of all performance levels. This clock manipulation is done at the user's own risk. See the README documentation of the 'CoolBits' X configuration option for more details," explain the Nvidia developers.

Lastly, Nvidia 370.28 comes with a new "PixelShiftMode" MetaMode option that enables support for 4K and 8K pixel shift displays, and an updated CurrentMetaMode reporting functionality to reflect the current state of ForceFullCompositionPipeline or ForceCompositionPipeline in MetaMode.

Download Nvidia 370.28 for 64-bit, 32-bit and ARM Linux, as well as FreeBSD and Solaris.