NVIDIA News Archives

Prior to launching their next-generation graphics processors, NVIDIA dropped their obfuscated open-source driver and have said they will not provide any open-source support at all for their GeForce GTX 400 "Fermi" series as they just recommended their customers use the X.Org VESA driver until they can install the official binary Linux driver. However, the community developers working on the Nouveau driver project still plan to support the GeForce GTX 470/480 graphics cards via clean-room reverse engineering. Today their efforts might be helped thanks to a hardware sponsorship.

With NVIDIA having announced the GeForce GTX 470 and 480 graphics cards (formerly known as "Fermi") at the end of March and these graphics cards starting to appear at Internet retailers (see links below), NVIDIA has now put out its OpenGL 4.0 Linux driver.

If you wondered why NVIDIA chose today to announce its canning the xf86-video-nv driver for all future GPUs and diverting users to use the VESA X.Org driver (even though most of them will start out using the Nouveau driver) until downloading their proprietary driver, it's because they have finally launched Fermi.

With the first of NVIDIA's GeForce 400 "Fermi" graphics cards arriving later this month, their software engineers have put out the release of CUDA 3.0. Version 3 of the Compute Unified Device Architecture has a wealth of changes including Fermi support, C++ support, a new unified interoperability API for Direct3D (including Direct3D 11.0) and OpenGL (including OpenGL 3.x/4.0), up to a 100x performance increase when debugging with cuda-gdb, a new CUDA memory checker, and support for all the OpenCL features in the latest R195 production driver package.

Well, that didn't take long. Just earlier this month the Khronos Group unveiled the OpenGL 4.0 specification that brought many long-awaited changed to this open graphics API. On the same day this industry consortium also released the OpenGL 3.3 specification, which aims to bring back as much of the OpenGL 4.0 functionality to graphics cards that only support OGL3. OpenGL 4.0 is designed for graphics cards that are meant for DirectX 11.0, which basically means AMD's Radeon HD 5000 series and NVIDIA's forthcoming GeForce 400 series. OpenGL 3.x on the other-hand is compatible with DirectX 10.0 grade hardware, such as the Radeon HD 4000 series and GeForce 200 series. For those with a newer NVIDIA graphics card, you can now run OpenGL 3.3 applications or games as they have just released a supported driver.

While NVIDIA has been working on the 195.xx Linux driver since before last November, they have yet to officially release a stable driver in this series as of yet. Betas have been available and they even had to recall their recent drivers over a fan speed issue that could damage the system, but now they are finally getting ready to push out a stable release.

Most Linux distributions this year will be switching over to the community-created Nouveau graphics driver stack now that there's mainline DRM support in the Linux 2.6.33 kernel and later releases that provides kernel mode-setting support and more. However, for those that have not yet made move to the Nouveau driver (or are running a *BSD or OpenSolaris where there is not yet the ported DRM) and are sticking it out with NVIDIA's rudimentary, feature-limited open-source driver, there is a new update out today. NVIDIA's Aaron Plattner has just declared the xf86-video-nv 2.1.17 driver release.

This week NVIDIA had to pull its latest WHQL-certified graphics drivers on Windows due to a bug that would cause the fan controller to not respond correctly to the current conditions of the GPU workload and in some cases would even turn the GPU's fan off. This bug could potentially kill the NVIDIA graphics card due to overheating. It turns out this potentially fatal bug is also present in their newest 195.36.08 and 195.36.03 Linux drivers.

The NVIDIA ION platform for nettops (like the ASRock ION 330HT-BD) and netbooks (like the ASUS Eee PC 1201N) launched last year and these parts have worked their way into many different low-powered computers. NVIDIA even recently introduced the ION2 platform, but it was not until today that they finally got around to adding the ION ASIC support to their feature-limited xf86-video-nv driver.

Last week we reported on GPU switching and then delayed GPU switching coming to Linux via some Linux kernel hacks, but today NVIDIA has launched a new technology for dual-GPU notebooks and that is "Optimus Technology." NVIDIA's Optimus is similar to the hybrid-switching technologies that have been available on notebooks up to this point for switching between ATI/AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA GPUs on notebooks depending upon the graphics workload, but with Optimus the experience is supposed to be seamless.

NVIDIA has been at work on the 195.xx driver series for some months already and has delivered beta releases to the public that offer VDPAU improvements and new features along with faster X Render performance. This evening they have published a new beta driver for the public, this time it's 195.36.03.

NVIDIA's Aaron Plattner has announced the release of libvdpau 0.4. From November of 2008 when VDPAU was introduced to September of 2009, the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix lived within NVIDIA's binary display driver package. However, in September NVIDIA began releasing a standalone driver package to make it easier for other Linux graphics drivers to implement. A month later NVIDIA then pushed out a DRI2 patch that allowed choosing the VDPAU back-end implementation on a per-screen basis.

While improved X Render support hasn't been specifically brought up by any users in our thread for What Do You Want From Linux GPU Drivers In 2010?, it looks like NVIDIA may be working on improving their X Render support in its binary graphics drivers. NVIDIA's X Render extension support is already quite good and fast after being revitalized in some driver updates last year, but recent work is signaling that they may be further polishing this support to help users with 2D acceleration.

Before going off on a holiday recess, NVIDIA's Unix graphics driver team has put out a new NVIDIA driver beta release in the 195.xx driver series for Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenSolaris. Just shy of a month ago NVIDIA had put out the 195.22 Linux display driver that delivered on VDPAU improvements, support for NVIDIA 3D Vision Stereo, better DisplayPort monitor handling, and many other enhancements.

Only 11 code commits have been made to the xf86-video-nv driver (that only touch about 100 lines of code) since the 2.1.15 driver update back in September, but coming out this afternoon is xf86-video-nv 2.1.16.

Last week after many DRM improvements went into the Linux 2.6.33 kernel Linus Torvalds got a bit upset and wanted Nouveau merged into the mainline kernel. After all, it's been in development for a few years and offers a vast feature-set compared to the xf86-video-nv DDX driver even if this driver is still somewhat experimental. Red Hat has been shipping Nouveau in their Fedora distribution for some time and others (such as Ubuntu) are jumping onto the Nouveau bandwagon too.

For those not interested in the Nouveau driver, head on over to NVIDIA's FTP server as a new 190.xx driver is available. Late last month NVIDIA released the 195.22 beta Linux driver as the first in this new driver series, and while there are new features and advancements going on there, NVIDIA is still maintaining the current 190.xx stable driver series. Released last night was the NVIDIA 190.53 pre-release driver.

Thanks to the surprise push this morning of the Nouveau driver for the Linux 2.6.33 kernel, this free software, reverse-engineered NVIDIA driver stack is on its way to being used in a lot more Linux systems and distributions. The xf86-video-nouveau X.Org driver will still need to have a release in the coming months, but in 2010 it looks like this driver stack will be working its way into many more Linux distributions. Fedora was the first to ship Nouveau by default, Ubuntu has plans to use Nouveau in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, and with the mainlining of the Nouveau DRM the flood gates have essentially been broken open for the other vendors to pickup these latest bits once this kernel has been formally released.

This morning the first DRM pull request went in for the Linux 2.6.33 kernel that brings many nice graphics changes for Intel, ATI/AMD, and VMware users. Anything for NVIDIA hardware through Novueau was not mentioned as there is no readied support, but as we stated in our article this morning, its unlikely to see Nouveau's DRM in the mainline kernel before the Linux 2.6.34 kernel. This is even though Fedora has been shipping Nouveau support for a few releases now and even Canonical is pulling in Nouveau KMS support for Ubuntu 10.04.

After talking about NVIDIA's forthcoming 64-bit FreeBSD driver we were alerted to the fact that the first 195.xx public beta driver is now available. Earlier this month we first talked about the NVIDIA Linux 195.xx driver series as Fermi GT 300 support was being worked on, but now a Fermi-less (or at least from their official change-log) driver has arrived. This driver is at version 195.22 and brings several changes to the Linux front.

In hopes of pushing VDPAU beyond just being a NVIDIA Unix driver technology and to make it an open standard for Linux video driver developers wishing to provide HD video acceleration on Linux via the GPU, NVIDIA released a standalone VDPAU library back in September and have been trying to push some VDPAU bits for DRI2.

While many of the distributions arriving this autumn and winter are shipping with an X Server 1.6 build rather than the new X Server 1.7, if you are using Fedora 12 or another distribution shipping with the latest X.Org 7.5 packages, there is good news if you are a customer of NVIDIA's older graphics hardware.

It was just last week that NVIDIA had finally released a stable 190.xx Linux driver after this driver series had been in beta for months. The 190.xx driver series brought new hardware support, OpenGL 3.2 support, VDPAU improvements, and a fair amount of other changes. However, NVIDIA is now in the process of readying the 195.xx Linux driver series.

A week after the NVIDIA Linux engineering team released the 190.42 driver release candidate, this driver is now deemed stable and has been officially released on NVIDIA's web-site. The NVIDIA 190.42 driver is the first official release in the 190.xx Linux driver series, which has been in beta for a number of months and undergone numerous releases.

NVIDIA's Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix -- or more commonly known as VDPAU -- has had phenomenal success since this video playback/decoding API was published last year and implemented within their proprietary graphics driver on Linux. VDPAU on NVIDIA hardware utilizes the PureVideo engine and is able to provide very impressive video playback capabilities even when running a very low-end CPU and GPU. VDPAU has been adopted in a variety of Linux multimedia applications from FFmpeg to XBMC to MythTV.

While there have been NVIDIA 190.xx Linux driver releases on the Internet going back to June, a stable driver release in this series that supports OpenCL, brings new VDPAU features, provides OpenGL 3.2, and supports new hardware has yet to take place. In fact, the last stable update was NVIDIA 185.18.36 back in August. The 190.xx driver series though is slowly getting ready to be officially supported by this Santa Clara company.

It's been no secret that NVIDIA has been working on an OpenCL Linux driver for their graphics processors just as AMD has been doing, but up until now their beta drivers were only available to registered NVIDIA developers. Today though -- on the same day as NVIDIA's OpenCL driver launch for Windows -- they have made their OpenCL support publicly available.

After releasing a standalone VDPAU library, NVIDIA's Aaron Plattner shared an interesting tid-bit on the X.Org mailing list in response to questions raised by Red Hat's David Airlie. The Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix will have its own protocol, similar to that of XvMC and DRI. This VDPAU protocol will be used for telling the client (multimedia) applications what driver is to be used for the VDPAU acceleration and Aaron also has plans for adding indirect rendering support to this NVIDIA HD video playback API.

While NVIDIA developed VDPAU (the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix, one awesome way of accelerating HD video playback with great results) for use in their proprietary graphics driver, the API itself is open and has been well adopted by multimedia applications.

The NVIDIA 190.xx driver series already delivers on OpenGL 3.2 support and other new features, but continuing on with beta releases, NVIDIA's Linux engineers have released a new beta (v190.32) that brings a few more features.

If you have any (non-tech support) questions about NVIDIA and Linux, ask away! Phoronix will be hosting a question and answer session with NVIDIA regarding their Linux graphics driver. If you have any questions to ask, click on the "Comments and Discussion" button below and ask away in our forums. After a few days we will be narrowing down the list of questions before NVIDIA begins answering them.

NVIDIA hasn't been updating their binary Linux drivers as frequently as they were earlier this year when it would be hard to go even just a week without seeing a new beta, an official update, or changes to either of their legacy drivers. However, there are some new NVIDIA Linux drivers to start off this week. For those sticking with the official NVIDIA driver releases there is now the 185.18.36 release while those willing to try out a beta driver there is the 190.25 build.

Yesterday there was the major announcement of the OpenGL 3.2 release, but the news coming out of today from New Orleans during SIGGRAPH is OptiX, which comes from the folks at NVIDIA. OptiX is a ray-tracing engine developed by NVIDIA to run on Quadro FX graphics cards and uses their CUDA architecture. Later on this year NVIDIA will then release an interactive ray-trace renderer that uses OptiX within their SceniX engine.

While NVIDIA's driver engineers are hard at work on the 190.xx driver series, which among other features does bring OpenGL 3.2 support, for those living by the stable releases there is a new driver that's out today. The NVIDIA 185.18.29 Linux driver was uploaded to NVIDIA's FTP server this morning and does bring a number of changes as listed in their official release highlights.

Earlier this week NVIDIA had released their first beta driver in the NVIDIA 190.xx Linux series. The official change-log for the driver was pretty interesting as there were some new additions and other improvements, but unofficially, it delivered OpenGL 3.2 Linux support. The OpenGL 3.2 specification hasn't even been released yet, but we anticipate it will be announced by the Khronos Group early next month at SIGGRAPH.

Late last month there was a private beta driver from NVIDIA for the 190.xx Linux driver series that was leaked onto the Internet. There was no complete change-log with this leak, but we have a change-log now as NVIDIA this afternoon released its first public beta driver. The NVIDIA 190.16 Beta driver was released for Linux as their first public beta release in this forthcoming software series.

NVIDIA's Aaron Plattner has just announced the release of the xf86-video-nv 2.1.14 driver, but does it have anything in store? Not really. The NVIDIA open-source X.Org driver update brings support for a couple of new ASICs, fixed mode-setting for some NVIDIA GPUs, and other fixes, but nothing too exciting... At least compared to the ATI X.Org module and other drivers that have picked up kernel mode-setting support and other exciting features.

The latest stable NVIDIA Linux driver release is in the 185.xx series, but NVIDIA developers have been hard at work on the forthcoming 190.xx driver series. Among other features, this next major driver update is expected to bring their talked about OpenCL support.

Back in May we shared that NVIDIA was readying its OpenCL Linux driver and had submitted their OpenCL 1.0 NVIDIA drivers to the Khronos Group for certification. As of this morning, NVIDIA has now released its OpenCL driver for Linux (and Windows), but it's only available if you are a registered NVIDIA developer. Developers of hand-helds, games, workstations, and GPU computing are able to apply and if you are lucky you will get your hands on the OpenCL binary driver.

While NVIDIA is hard at work on the 185.xx display driver series for Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenSolaris systems, as can be seen by their 185.18.14 driver release just days ago. However, for those sticking with the official NVIDIA driver updates, a new release in the 180.xx series is now available. The NVIDIA 180.60 Linux driver brings a few noteworthy changes.

NVIDIA hasn't released as many Linux driver updates in May as they have in past months, but this week they are out with the NVIDIA 185.18.14 driver update. This proprietary driver for x86 and x86_64 Linux features a variety of bug-fixes, VDPAU enhancements, and better support for newer Linux kernels. Interestingly, NVIDIA hasn't updated their proprietary FreeBSD or Solaris drivers to this latest version, nor have they even been updated in a while.

It has been two or three weeks since we were last presented with a new display driver from NVIDIA for Linux, whether it be in their 180.xx or 185.xx series, a stable release, a beta release, or any of their legacy driver updates. This timespan is quite long compared to the past few months where they have released as many as five Linux drivers per month. This evening though there is now a new stable release in the NVIDIA 180.xx driver series.

Andrew Humber, NVIDIA's senior PR manager for their Tesla and CUDA products, has passed along word that they have submitted OpenCL 1.0 supportive drivers to the Khronos Group for conformance certification. This initial OpenCL support will be on Linux and Windows, though there was no mention of OpenCL on Solaris/OpenSolaris or FreeBSD where they also maintain proprietary drivers.

Last month there were five Linux driver releases from NVIDIA and we have already seen quite a few this month, but just days after releasing the 180.51 Linux driver, they have pushed out another new release. This time around NVIDIA released a new beta in the 185 series, which is called 185.18.04.

NVIDIA has now managed to make it nearly two weeks before issuing a new Linux driver update. The NVIDIA 185.19 Beta is still the latest in the 185.xx series, but NVIDIA has provided a pre-release of the 180.51 driver.

The ill-maintained, feature-limited, and obfuscated driver known as xf86-video-nv driver has a new release out. This is the first open-source NVIDIA X.Org driver update in several months, but its change-log is rather limited. The xf86-video-nv 2.1.13 release was pushed out by Red Hat's Adam Jackson, and not even NVIDIA.

NVIDIA had ended out March with five Linux display driver releases with it ranging from a day to a week between updated Linux drivers were pushed out from this Santa Clara company. It's been just over a week since their last display driver release, but it looks like April will be another month of fierce Linux/Solaris/BSD driver updates from NVIDIA.

You may have just installed the 180.37.04 Linux driver since it was released merely six days ago with OpenGL 3.1 support, but this morning NVIDIA has officially released the 180.44 Linux driver.

NVIDIA pushed out the 185.13 Beta Linux driver just four days ago, but already they have released another new Linux driver. This time around, the NVIDIA 180.37.04 driver was released. Most notably what's introduced with this driver is support for OpenGL 3.1, which was just publicly announced by the Khronos Group a few hours ago. This driver is based upon the 180.3x release stream does not incorporate some of the features found in the newer 185.xx series.

It has not even been a week since the release of 185.13 Beta Linux driver, but today these Santa Clara engineers have pushed out yet another driver update for Linux. The NVIDIA 180.41 driver is this newest driver and it brings support for new Quadro FX graphics cards, improved power management on some systems, and bug-fixes.