NVIDIA 177.70 Beta Linux Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA 177.70 Beta Linux Driver

Last week NVIDIA had released the NVIDIA 177.67 driver and then immediately following that was the NVIDIA 177.68 driver and now today marks the release of the NVIDIA 177.70 driver. Like the two former releases, the 177.70 release is another beta driver.The NVIDIA 177.70 Linux driver doesn't have many changes to mention compared to the 177.67 and 177.68 releases but just a few bug-fixes...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NjY4MA

[deanjo]

Changes since 177.68:

• Added support for the following new GPUs:
  
  • GeForce 9800 GTX+
  • GeForce 9800 GT
  • GeForce 8100P
  • nForce 780a SLI
  • nForce 750a SLI
  • Quadro FX 770M
  • Quadro NVS 160M
  • Quadro NVS 150M
• Improved support for RENDER operations with the same source
  and destination; this should enhance performance in
  some situations, e.g. when dragging Plasma applets in KDE4.
• Fixed a text rendering performance regression that affected
  GeForce 6 and 7 series GPUs.
• Fixed a regression that caused text to be missing or
  corrupt on GeForce 6 and 7 series GPUs.
• Fixed a regression responsible for false negatives during
  SLI video bridge detection attempts after X server
  restarts.
• Fixed a bug that resulted in AGP FW/SBA settings and overrides
  being applied incorrectly when using the Linux kernel's
  AGP GART driver.
• Fixed a bug that caused initialization of the builtin AGP
  GART driver (NvAGP) to fail.

[DeepDayze]

Going to test the new driver tonight...

I did have issues with text being missing with the 177.68 driver. Icons and taskbars rendered with no text. Text only had appeared when I moused over them.

Card I have in my test system is a GeForce 6800 GS.

OK The new driver fixed the missing text rendering issue. Haven't used compiz with it yet

[Med_]

And ... still dog slow on my NVS 135M. I am not sure this driver will ever get fixed on laptops. KDE has been out for 8 months now and still the same problems.

[_txf_]

I should point out that whilst all these beta drivers have improved kde4 and other performance, it is still impossible to use without disabling powermizer...

powermizer with composting effects is more or less bearable, it is actually all the rest which is impossible.

[Dragoran]

There is no release page for this NVIDIA 177.70 Linux driver either

NVIDIA said that they are doing this to be able to release (beta drivers) more frequently by simply uploading them to the ftp and announce in the nvnews forum.

[Med_]

I should point out that whilst all these beta drivers have improved kde4 and other performance, it is still impossible to use without disabling powermizer...

powermizer with composting effects is more or less bearable, it is actually all the rest which is impossible.

Is there a difference between having powermizer activated with the clock speed always set at the highest level and having powermizer completely deactivated whatsoever? This is however hardly acceptable for a laptop, it kills the battery.

[_txf_]

Is there a difference between having powermizer activated with the clock speed always set at the highest level and having powermizer completely deactivated whatsoever? This is however hardly acceptable for a laptop, it kills the battery.

If you set your clocks to the maximum that is the same as having powermizer disabled. AFAIK powermizer only scales gpu frequency and doesn't do some of the fancier things that cpus do.

If you want to use (smooth) compositing or kde4 (with or without compositing) then you just have to bear it. Stupid I know, but blame nvidia and Xrender ( mostly the second I guess... seeing as vista with sm2.0 dwm monstrosity along with the windows widgets work just fine on the lowest powemizer freq bracket).

These problems stem from the fact that not enough is accelerated under xrender and is a bad arch to accelerate things in the first place, the former probably due to the latter...

urgh...I didn't mean to end up going on a rant but that is how it turned out