NVIDIA 304.37 Linux Driver Brings 41 Official Changes

The first certified NVIDIA 304 series Linux graphics driver has been released. The NVIDIA 304.37 Linux x86/x86_64 graphics driver packs in 41 official changes affecting several areas of this leading proprietary graphics driver.

The NVIDIA 304.37 Linux "certified" driver succeeds the earlier 304.22 beta and 304.30 beta drivers. As such, the 41 listed changes to this certified driver update aren't all brand new if you used one of these earlier 304 series betas, but overall there's some exciting stuff.

The key changes to the NVIDIA 304.37 Linux GeForce/Quadro/Tesla driver include:

- Support for the GeForce GTX 680M, Quadro K1000M, Quadro K2000M, and Tesla K10 graphics processors. These are some of the latest NVIDIA Kepler-based GPUs.

- Various RandR bug-fixes and other minor improvements concerning NVIDIA's new support for version 1.2 and newer of the Resize and Rotate extension for X.Org.

- OpenGL corruption fixes and the blue tinting bug that affected earlier releases.

- A --disable-nouveau switch for the NVIDIA binary blob installer that will attempt to automatically kill the open-source Nouveau DRM driver to prevent it from being loaded and conflicting with NVIDIA's official driver.

- Support for xorg-server ABI 13, a.k.a. early X.Org Server 1.13 support.

- Performance fixes for certain RENDER operations.

- Improved EDID handling.

- Support for FXAA anti-aliasing. Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing ignores polygons and line edges as it just analyzes the screen's pixels. FXAA is a shader program that analyzes the pixels each frame and smooths out any pixels that create an artificial edge. It's very simple but much less advanced than some of the other anti-aliasing methods. However, due to its simplicity, it's very lightweight and fast. (Phoronix benchmarks of NVIDIA FXAA are coming.)

- Support for DisplayPort 1.2 branch devices, which allows for multiple displays to be daisy-chained from a single DisplayPort connector.

- Addressing the security vulnerability in the NVIDIA driver that allowed you to easily gain root access.

- Various bug-fixes.

Overall this is a very nice and hefty update to NVIDIA's proprietary Linux graphics driver. The FreeBSD and Solaris NVIDIA drivers have also been updated as part of their shared UNIX driver development approach at NVIDIA. The NVIDIA 304.37 Linux driver can be downloaded at NVIDIA.com where the complete change-log is also available.