14 DAY TRIAL // Nvidia released a new long-lived display driver for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris operating systems to add support for a couple of recent graphics cards and fix various annoying bugs.
The Nvidia 418.56 graphics driver is now available for Linux, BSD, and Solaris systems, adding support for the Nvidia GeForce MX230 and Nvidia GeForce MX250 graphics cards, which are very powerful mobile GPUs used in select laptops. Support for these two Nvidia GPUs is only available for GNU/Linux and FreeBSD systems.
For all supported platforms, including Linux, BSD, and Solaris, the Nvidia 418.56 graphics driver updates the nvidia-settings control panel to more accurately indicate the current availability of G-SYNC and G-SYNC-compatible display settings, as well as to disable line wrapping during non-terminal output in command-line mode.
Vulkan and PRIME improvements for Linux users
Only for Linux users, the Nvidia 418.56 display driver implements a new mechanism for restricting the use of the graphics card's performance counters to system administrators (root users) by default, who can restore the more permissive previous behavior if they set the "NVreg_RestrictProfilingToAdminUsers=0" argument when loading the nvidia.ko kernel module.
Also for Linux users, the Nvidia 418.56 graphics driver addresses a bug that may have caused certain Vulkan apps to lock up the graphics card when freeing large amounts of memory on PRIME-enabled systems. You can download Nvidia 418.56 for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris operating systems right now from our free software portal for 64-bit computers.
We recommend all users to update their systems to the Nvidia 418.56 display driver as soon as possible since this is the latest long lived branch offered by Nvidia for Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris users. The latest short lived branch version is Nvidia 415.27, which isn't recommended anymore.