NVIDIA 346.16 Beta Adds VP8 Decoding, NVENC, GTK3 & Much More

NVIDIA just introduced the 346.xx Linux graphics driver series with the introduction of the 346.16 beta driver, and it's a big freaking update! New features for users of the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver!

Among the many great changes for the NVIDIA 346.16 release include:

- VDPAU VP8 video stream decoding support for the latest-generation Maxwell GPUs that add VP8 decode support.

- Support for changing the operating voltage of NVIDIA GeForce 400 "Fermi" GPUs and newer. This can be done as part of the CoolBits re-clocking from the NVIDIA Linux control panel to have user control over the GPU's voltage.

- New accelerated RENDER formats support.

- Support for the EGL_EXT_device_base, EGL_EXT_platform_device, and EGL_EXT_output_base extensions.

- Support for the GeForce GTX 970M and GTX 980M Maxwell mobile graphics processors.

- The NVIDIA Settings utility has been ported to GTK+ 3 when available but otherwise will maintain GTK2 support.

- Faster NVIDIA Linux driver installation using parallel make jobs for building the NVIDIA kernel modules.

- GLSL compiler bug fixes.

- Rendering corruption fixes.

- Much faster OpenGL FBO performance.

- Various other bug fixes.

- Support for the latest Linux kernel releases (Linux 3.17~3.18)

Find out more details via this NVIDIA DevTalk post. Stay tuned for NVIDIA 346.16 Beta graphics driver benchmarks at Phoronix. It's great to see NVIDIA putting out feature-rich NVIDIA Linux driver updates while there hasn't been any AMD Catalyst Linux graphics driver update in quite some time now, arguably due to work on the next-generation "AMDGPU" driver that will benefit the Radeon R9 285 "Tonga" hardware and newer.