Long-lived Nvidia 440.31 is now available for download

Nov 4, 2019 15:54 GMT  ·  By

Nvidia has released today a new graphics driver for UNIX systems, including GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris, to add support for new GPUs and various improvements.

Nvidia 440.31 is now available as the latest long-lived branch of the proprietary graphics driver for Linux, BSD, and Solaris platforms, adding support for the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER graphics card, parallel GLSL shader linking by default, support for HDMI 2.1 variable refresh rate (VRR), as well as support for the GL_NV_gpu_multicast and GLX_NV_multigpu_context extensions.

It also brings VP9 decode support to the Nvidia VDPAU driver, a new "SidebandSocketPath" X configuration option to control the folder where the X driver creates a pathname UNIX domain socket that's being used to communicate with the Nvidia OpenGL, Vulkan, and VDPAU driver components, and EGL support for PRIME render offload, and optimizes the GPU clock management strategy.

Bug fixes, improvements, and other changes

The Nvidia 440.31 graphics driver also fixes several issues reported by users from previous releases, including a regression in the Nvidia 440.26 driver that may prevent the Nvidia kernel modules from building correctly on systems localized in another language than English, as well as a bug that would cause the X server to crash when running apps with GLX indirect rendering.

Initial support for Linux kernel 5.4 is present as well in the Nvidia 440.31 graphics driver, which updates several components, such as the Module.symvers sanity check to address an error occurring during the installation of the driver or when rebuilding DKMS against Linux 5.4 RC kernels, and the nvidia-drm kernel module to be compatible with the removal of the DRIVER_PRIME flag in newer Linux kernel versions.

Among other noteworthy changes, we can mention that the Nvidia 440.31 graphics driver updates the confirmation dialog box displayed when quitting the nvidia-settings control panel to report when there's pending configuration changes that may be lost if they're not saved or applied before quitting, and improves support for the Saints Row: The Third and Saints Row IV video games.

With this releas, the Nvidia driver will now fall back to system memory when video memory is full for certain driver-internal allocations. You can download Nvidia 440.31 for 64-bit GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris operating systems right now through our free software portal or update your installations via the official repositories of your favorite distribution.