Continuing the 1.0-8751 Voyage

Yet some more items to throw out to the Linux community in regards to NVIDIA's upcoming display drivers. Further testing has revealed that these drivers we have tested (1.0-8751 -- Beta) may contain some slight improvements to the Transgaming Cedega performance when it was tried in Half-Life 2. Outside of the Windows gaming emulation, there has not been much else that we have found when it comes to performance improvements in other Linux-native games, nor nothing in the way of noticeable performance drops. With one of the NVIDIA GeForce 7800GTX G70 512MB solutions that we had used for this Beta testing, we had found the ambient temperature no longer being displayed, while other cards with nvidia-settings have faired appropriately.

While NVIDIA has yet to come out and officially address the Linux community as to the status of these upcoming display drivers, and we have been stating here at Phoronix that the drivers are a "few weeks away", we believe the release may be quickly approaching. With many of NVIDIA's past driver launches, they have coincided with the release of the Windows ForceWare drivers. These simultaneous releases are similar to ATI and their monthly ritual of delivering out new display drivers for both Windows and Linux. Anyhow, we have begun to receive reports today that this Wednesday, March 22, 2006, NVIDIA will be introducing yet another ForceWare release. This new ForceWare released (dubbed 84.25) will largely address performance issues for a Windows game coming out tomorrow entitled Oblivion. Whether NVIDIA will compliment this new ForceWare release with these updated Linux (and possibly Solaris/FreeBSD) drivers, we do not know for certainty at this time but it's yet another possibility.