NVIDIA News Archives

While NVIDIA may not be doing much to help out Nouveau at the moment, they at least are supporting their Linux customers well in continuing to maintain their legacy binary Linux graphics drivers. The 304.1190 Linux driver was released today to fix a problem from NVIDIA's Nalu days.

An open-source, independent developer has written an implementation of NVIDIA 3D Vision for OpenGL with Linux compatibility.

It's been a while since the last official mainline NVIDIA Linux graphics update, but that changed this morning with the debut of the exciting NVIDIA 331.38 Linux GPU driver.

NVIDIA released today the 319.82 binary Linux graphics driver with new graphics card support and handling for the X.Org Server 1.15 release.

PRIME rendering support is coming to the open-source NVIDIA Tegra graphics driver with the Linux 3.14 kernel.

NVIDIA has kicked off CES week by announcing their latest Tegra ARM SoC, the Tegra K1. The NVIDIA Tegra K1 is a killer SoC with custom 64-bit design and a Kepler-derived graphics processor with 192 GPU cores.

Last week NVIDIA updated one of their legacy Linux GPU drivers for supporting decade-old GPUs. Today, they've put out another legacy Linux driver release.

The nvidia-prime 0.5 package landed today for Ubuntu 14.04 in the long-standing effort to improve NVIDIA Optimus laptop support under Linux for systems with both Intel and NVIDIA graphics processors.

Making some AMD Catalyst Legacy users jealous is that NVIDIA's still maintaining their old legacy Linux binary driver branches. NVIDIA this morning has updated their legacy Linux driver for supporting the new X.Org Server.

While NVIDIA historically looked at Linux as a market for pushing more Quadro workstation GPU sales, with Valve's SteamOS Linux / Steam Machines and activities from other game studios, NVIDIA is now taking Linux gaming seriously.

For the past week now I have been running Linux benchmarks on a lot of new NVIDIA GPUs, including the GeForce GTX 760, GTX 770, GTX 780 Ti, and GTX TITAN. These graphics cards with their Linux reviews coming out soon have been running top-notch with the binary Linux driver and running a heck of a lot faster than the slow-performing Radeon R9 290 with the current Catalyst Linux driver.

It's Supercomputing SC13 week and as such NVIDIA announced today the Tesla K40 as their latest ultra high-end GPU for HPC purposes. The Tesla K40 GPU accelerator is to compete with the FirePro S10000 that was announced by AMD last week. Both these GPUs designed for super-computing applications have 12GB of memory.

NVIDIA rolled out CUDA version 6 this morning, their latest major update to their Compute Unified Device Architecture for GPGPU / parallel programming. With CUDA 6, NVIDIA says its now simpler to achieve better parallel programming on the GPU.

A number of new NVIDIA GeForce graphics card reviews under Linux are underway along with many more Linux GPU driver analysis articles, etc. NVIDIA has just sent over to Phoronix a number of new high-end graphics cards.

Linux kernel support for NVIDIA's Tegra 4 ARM platform have been around for nearly one year but only with the Linux 3.13 kernel is this latest-generation high-performance ARM Cortex-A15 based solution going to be supported by the mainline Linux kernel.

If you are reliant upon NVIDIA's CUDA computing parallel computing platform, hopefully you're running 64-bit Linux. NVIDIA announced their plans on Friday to deprecate the 32-bit Linux x86 CUDA Toolkit and the 32-bit Linux CUDA driver.

NVIDIA released yesterday the 331.20 Linux graphics driver update that stabilizes the R331 Linux driver with new features like EGL, modern Linux kernel support, a new frame-buffer capture library, and plenty of other features. Following that, NVIDIA has now released an updated legacy driver for the GeForce 6/7 series graphics cards that are the better part of a decade old.

The NVIDIA 331.20 Linux graphics driver has been released today. The NVIDIA 331.20 Linux driver has a workaround to support the Linux 3.11 and 3.12 kernels along with introducing NvFBCOpenGL. The new NvFBCOpenGL is for NVIDIA OpenGL frame-buffer capturing that's high-performance and low-latency.

In mid-October I had written how AMD's Catalyst driver surprisingly beat NVIDIA to modern Linux support. While NVIDIA is usually first to support new kernel releases, AMD won in shipping "out of the box" Linux 3.11 and 3.12 compatibility. NVIDIA, however, has devised a workaround and will be coming up with a more proper long-term solution.

With the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Linux review out of the way, I carried out some benchmarks comparing the performance of the open-source "Nouveau" driver to NVIDIA's official closed-source Linux graphics driver on this Kepler-based GK107 GPU. Similar to other NVIDIA GeForce 400/500/600 GPUs, if using the Nouveau driver as found by default on Ubuntu Linux and others, you can expect the performance to be less than 20% that of the official NVIDIA Linux driver.

NVIDIA released this week the 331.17 Beta Linux graphics driver that adds support for several new GPUs, introduces a new NVIDIA Unified Memory kernel module, and has a number of bug-fixes.

Last month NVIDIA announced they would begin providing open-source GPU documentation and ultimately supporting the reverse-engineered open-source Nouveau graphics driver project for their Linux desktop customers. NVIDIA released some basic documentation in that initial push and now they have followed up with a tiny bit more documentation.

As some extra benchmarks to share today, here are benchmarks of four NVIDIA GeForce 400/500/600 (Fermi and Kepler) graphics cards from the latest NVIDIA 331 Linux driver beta.

NVIDIA this morning unveiled their first Linux graphics driver beta as part of the 331.xx series. The NVIDIA 331.13 Beta that was released this morning for Linux systems is quite exciting in that it brings a whole lot of fixes, improvements, and new features. Perhaps most exciting is that there's finally (but limited) EGL support right now -- a precursor for handling Wayland and Mir.

To kick off a new month NVIDIA has released a new NVIDIA Linux binary graphics driver update. The first driver release of October is the 319.60 debut.

While the proprietary NVIDIA Windows driver has features not found in the NVIDIA Linux driver, it seems the company will not support Linux-only hardware driver features. At least one feature has been removed from the NVIDIA Linux driver over "feature parity between Windows and Linux."

While NVIDIA hasn't yet released any EGL support for their binary desktop Linux graphics driver to complement GLX, we know they are working on it going back to last year's XDC. At this year's XDC event, there was a brief NVIDIA EGL presentation.

This week at XDC2013 NVIDIA made one of the biggest surprise announcements... NVIDIA will begin publishing NDA-free GPU programming documentation. They already have released some documentation and more is on the way as they seek to assist the Nouveau graphics driver developers in writing a full open-source 3D Linux graphics driver for GeForce GPUs.

NVIDIA unveiled their own complete tablet design today based around their new Tegra 4 SoC, the Tegra Note. The Tegra Note is a $199 USD tablet running Android with NVIDIA's own customization and is sporting their fine Tegra 4 SoC with 72-core GeForce graphics.

Proposed nearly one year ago was a new Linux OpenGL ABI by Andy Ritger of NVIDIA. Among the reasons for this proposal of a new ABI included EGL becoming the future over GLX, OpenGL advancing greatly, and issues surrounding each vendor/driver shippimg their own libGL.so.1 file. As part of making this work finally become a reality, NVIDIA has published the code to libglvnd, an OpenGL vendor-neutral dispatch library.

The NVIDIA SHIELD portable gaming device/console was released at the end of July and now NVIDIA has come forward with the source-code to the whole operating system in hopes of encouraging enthusiasts to modify and improve the platform.

NVIDIA has released the short-lived 325.15 "Certified" Linux graphics driver update. With this new NVIDIA 325.15 Linux graphics driver comes a horde of fixes and other minor advancements and new graphics processor support.

NVIDIA released version 0.7 of libvdpau, the VDPAU wrapper library for interacting with driver-specific Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) implementations.

After a delay, NVIDIA released today its SHIELD portable gaming console that's powered by Android.

NVIDIA announced earlier this week that they have acquired The Portland Group (PGI), a company well-respected for their code compilers.

The Khronos Group only publicly unveiled the OpenGL 4.4 specification yesterday, but already NVIDIA Corp has out public beta drivers for Windows and Linux of their first graphics drivers to support OpenGL 4.4 and GLSL 4.40.

A Phoronix reader has shared two NVIDIA binary Linux graphics driver "hacks" he's written for overriding some functionality of the NVIDIA binary blob for GeForce hardware.

With the NVIDIA 323.xx proprietary display driver series reaching a mature state, NVIDIA's Unix/Linux developers today released the 325.08 Beta to kick off a new series.

Earlier this month we found out NVIDIA was bringing their driver to ARM -- following an announcement that NVIDIA would begin licensing Kepler graphics to SoC vendors -- and now they have done their first public release of the ARMv7 binary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver.

NVIDIA has issued an updated proprietary Linux graphics driver in their 319.xx driver series. The NVIDIA 319.32 Linux graphics driver release brings with it some new hardware support and features.

With NVIDIA entering the GPU IP licensing business, the need to support EGL by their binary display driver -- and with that the Ubuntu Mir display server and Wayland -- has become more pressing.

NVIDIA is bringing their 319.xx proprietary graphics driver from Linux x86 to ARM.

For those registered developers with NVIDIA Corp, the company has released their first release candidate of the forthcoming CUDA 5.5 platform.

To join the GeForce GTX TITAN and GTX 780 as the newest high-performance NVIDIA GPUs, rolled out this morning was the GeForce GTX 770. NVIDIA has introduced the GTX 770 as a new high-performance graphics card that's priced at $399 USD.

NVIDIA released today the 319.23 Linux graphics driver, which supports the just-released GeForce GTX 780 graphics card. There's also a couple of other changes to this certified Linux driver update, including 4K HDMI support.

NVIDIA has announced the release of their 310.51 "certified" proprietary graphics driver for Linux, Solaris, and BSD operating systems.

One month after releasing the very first NVIDIA 319.xx Linux driver beta, NVIDIA has now released their 319.17 driver as a certified Linux driver that supports an assortment of new features.

A NVIDIA engineer has code dropped over 2,500 lines of new open-source code that enables application-level support for host1x hardware through a new Stream library.

After showing off early Mesa 9.2 benchmarks with Nouveau and Nouveau improvements with the Linux 3.9 kernel, our latest NVIDIA Linux benchmarks from one of our Lenovo ThinkPad laptops is comparing the NVIDIA vs. Nouveau driver performance on Ubuntu 13.04.

For seeing whether NVIDIA's new 319.12 Beta Linux graphics driver that introduces many new features has any impact on the OpenGL performance for many common Linux games, here are some Phoronix test results when comparing the NVIDIA 304.xx, 310.xx, 313.xx, and 319.xx graphics driver series on GeForce GTX 550 Ti "Fermi" and GeForce GTX 680 "Kepler" graphics cards.