NVIDIA Updates Its Legacy Linux Graphics Driver

NVIDIA issued an update last week for its older legacy driver series in order to support the latest X.Org Server plus brings other fixes.

The NVIDIA 173.14.37 Linux driver was released on Saturday. The 173.14.37 driver adds in support for the X.Org Server ABI14 (X.Org Server 1.14) along with a dependency fix for the nvidia-settings binary and a fix for poor font rendering performance and corruption on X Servers with back-ported support from Pixman 0.27.

NVIDIA's mainline driver has already been supporting X.Org Server 1.14 for many weeks and it's good to see their legacy drivers being updated now for this new X.Org Server release, which was only officially declared stable just last week. NVIDIA has -- yet again -- beat AMD to delivering new X.Org Server ABI support. NVIDIA's legacy drivers are already being updated for the new support while AMD's mainline Catalyst driver still only has X.Org Server 1.13 support.

The legacy NVIDIA GeForce FX driver update can be fetched from NVIDIA.com.

For the NVIDIA 310.xx long-lived branch series, the NVIDIA 310.40 driver was updated on Friday. This driver update takes care of reducing the time needed to establish frame-locks for some stereo configurations, a glXSwapIntervalEXT fix, improved support for recent Linux kernels, an X Server rendering corruption fix, and a dependency fix for the nvidia-settings binary.

The NVIDIA 310.40 driver also has official support for many new GPUs: GeForce G205M, GeForce GT 240M LE, GeForce 405M, GeForce 610, GeForce 615, GeForce 620M, GeForce GT 625M, GeForce GT 625 (OEM), GeForce GT 635, GeForce 705M, GeForce 710M, GeForce GT 710M, GeForce GT 720A, GeForce GT 730M, Tesla X2070, Tesla S2050, and Tesla K20s.

A few days prior was the NVIDIA 313.26 Linux driver with support for the GeForce GTX TITAN, among other changes.

In case you missed it, NVIDIA soon is discontinuing Linux 2.4 kernel support.