NVIDIA 177.78 Beta Linux Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA 177.78 Beta Linux Driver

The NVIDIA 177.76 Linux driver was released a week ago with a few changes from the earlier betas that made it out of NVIDIA's Santa Clara campus roughly a month ago. Now today NVIDIA has issued another Linux beta driver, which is at version 177.78. The only changes since the NVIDIA 177.76 release is fixing a performance regression within the GtkPerf GTK benchmark, using /sys/class/power_supply for determining the power-state within the driver, and fixing corruption when using SLI in SFR mode with OpenGL-based composite managers. The change-log and download links can be found within the NvNews forums...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=Njc0OQ

[Vadi]

Compiz and GTK fixes. Awesome

[eL_vErDe]

Compiz and GTK fixes. Awesome

Does it finally fix poor 2D performance on KDE4 with GeForce 8xxx/9xxx ?

[puntarenas]

Does it finally fix poor 2D performance on KDE4 with GeForce 8xxx/9xxx ?

I doubt it and don't expect any major improvements before 180.xx series.

[Xanikseo]

It may, because last driver release (177.76) they mentioned Xrender improvements, but they were not noticeable because of a regression on that driver, which is now gone.

I will test KDE 4 now (currently on Gnome)

EDIT: Doesn't seem much faster on KDE4. Not slow at all, but not 100% smooth. But I've never had too many problems with KDE4, and I don't use it much anyway, so I probably wouldn't notice the problems so much. But I can say that gnome is 100% smooth and KDE4 isn't.

[Vadi]

No idea, I don't use kde4 at all.

[StringCheesian]

Some of the new KDE4 performance fixes in 177.67-177.78 are off by default. An nVidia dev posted at nvnews to explain how to enable them for better KDE4 performance:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=118088

[XVampireX]

177.78 doesn't fix much, it does seem rather smooth as it was before... but with the 177 series of patches it seems like it's just not smooth enough.