NVIDIA's last Linux display driver release was just shy of two months ago when they had unveiled the 173.08 Beta driver with compatibility for the GeForce 9800 series and other new GeForce 9 parts. Prior to the 173.08 release was version 171.06, which was another beta release, and the last official release being NVIDIA 169.12 from February. NVIDIA this morning has released the 173.14.05 driver, which marks the return to their old naming convention, but it doesn't bring many changes compared to the recent beta releases and just a regurgitated release announcement.
The NVIDIA 173.14.05 driver brings support for the GeForce 8400, 8400GS, 9500M GS, 9600GS, 9600GSO, 9600GT, 9800GTX, and 9800GX2. On the workstation side, there is support for the Quadro FX 3600M, Quadro FX 5600/4600 SDI, and Quadro G-Sync II. This is the same support as what was found in the 173.08 release, and in some cases even earlier than that. Our review of the NVIDIA GeForce 9600GT was done with the 171.06 driver.
The bug fixes in this release and the earlier betas are mostly for the GeForce 8 / GeForce 9 series. There are also a few regression fixes relating to the EDID data, OpenGL rendering corruption, and hotkey switching on notebooks.
The NVIDIA 173.14.05 does ship with "out of the box" support for the Linux 2.6.25 kernel and preliminary support for X.Org 7.4 / X Server 1.5. For those using a Linux 2.6.26-rc kernel, the NVIDIA 173.14.05 driver needs to be patched manually. While there is preliminary X.Org 7.4 support, the nvidia-xconfig utility isn't yet friendly towards the minimalist xorg.conf files and may cause problems depending upon the user configuration. Improvements to nvidia-xconfig will come in a future release.
The NVIDIA 173.14.05 x86 and x86_64 Linux drivers can be downloaded here and here, respectively. The NVIDIA Solaris and FreeBSD drivers have also been updated against version 173.14.05 with many of the same changes.
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