Adds supports for multiple Nvidia Quadro GPUs

Feb 14, 2017 22:23 GMT  ·  By

Nvidia released today a new short-lived graphics driver for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris operating systems, adding support for multiple Quadro GPUs, as well as a bunch of new features and bug fixes.

Among the newly supported GPUs by Nvidia 378.13 graphics driver, we can mention Nvidia Quadro P400, Nvidia Quadro P600, Nvidia Quadro P1000, Nvidia Quadro P2000, Nvidia Quadro P3000, Nvidia Quadro P4000, Nvidia Quadro GP100, Nvidia Quadro M1200, and Nvidia Quadro M2200.

The new proprietary graphics driver also updates the nvidia-settings control panel to allow users to view configured PRIME displays, enables OpenGL threaded optimizations by default, and supports the VK_KHR_display and VK_KHR_display_swapchain Vulkan extensions.

"These optimizations will self-disable when they are degrading performance. As a result, performance should be unchanged for many applications, and increased for those that benefit from threaded optimizations and were not already forcing them enabled," read the release notes.

New infrastructure lets Nvidia EGL driver load external EGL libraries

The Nvidia 378.13 graphics driver also comes with a new infrastructure that makes it possible for the Nvidia EGL driver to load external EGL API platform libraries providing client-side support for new window systems. It also implements support for X.Org Server 1.19 or later (ABI 23).

To properly handle UEFI framebuffer consoles that have a physical address more than 4GB, the Nvidia graphics driver now supports the screen_info.ext_lfb_base field on Linux kernels that offer this functionality. Additionally, to allow multi-threaded compilation of GLSL shaders, the driver now supports the ARB_parallel_shader_compile extension.

Last but not least, Nvidia 378.13 disables OpenGL threaded optimizations for Xinerama, and fixes a handful of bugs discovered since the previous stable release, which you can view in the attached changelog. Download Nvidia 378.13 for 64-bit or 32-bit GNU/Linux systems, as well as for FreeBSD and Solaris platforms right now from our website.