14 DAY TRIAL // Nvidia has announced the immediate availability for download of the 325.15 certified version of its graphics driver for Linux operating systems.
Nvidia is on a roll and it seems to be the only major company that takes its role in the Linux environment seriously.
The main purpose of these drivers is to add support for a few new GPU chipsets, such as GRID K340, GRID K350, NVS 315, and Quadro K500M.
As usual, a lot of other fixes and improvements have been implemented in drivers, alongside the support for the chipsets. For example, the developers have fixed a bug in nvidia-settings that caused the GTK+ theme colors to be ignored for some UI elements.
Also, Nvidia has removed the support for Linux kernel 2.4 and is now requiring 2.6.9 or later. This was to be expected, especially because 2.4 was a really old kernel.
Nvidia also improved the rendering performance of complex gradients, added support for configuring SLI Mosaic and Base Mosaic in the "X Server Display Configuration" page of nvidia-settings, provided a fix for a bug in the nvidia-settings control panel that could cause spurious messages about layout inconsistencies, and update the nvidia-installer.
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.
Nvidia also provides some advice regarding the packaging used by various distributions and the availability of the drivers in the distro's repositories.
“Note that many Linux distributions provide their own packages of the NVIDIA Linux Graphics Driver in the distribution's native package management format. This may interact better with the rest of your distribution's framework, and you may want to use this rather than NVIDIA's official package,” reads the entry on the Nvidia website.
Download the Nvidia Display Driver 325.15 for Linux right now from Softpedia, for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.
Check out the changelog for a complete list of fixes and improvements.