April Drivers Bring May Blossoms

As we have been sharing time and time again in our news posts and articles that NVIDIA's inaugural Linux driver release for 2006 is just around the corner -– or should we say the first release geared towards consumers --- seeing as there was the unmentioned 1.0-8183 release earlier this year that were simply targeted for Hewlett-Packard's workstations until Phoronix had made public this discovery. While we had these NVIDIA Beta drivers for some time now, and have had the privilege of sharing the discovered information since the GeForce 7900 launch, we still have yet to come across the official change-log. However, if you will dig back into some of our previous 1.0-8751 related articles, many of the changes and new features can be spotted. While we have yet to be officially addressed as to the public launch date for NVIDIA's upcoming Linux (and likely Solaris/FreeBSD) drivers, we have a few remaining thoughts to share today. Our last non-confidential briefing on this matter with NVIDIA has yielded that the drivers are still anticipated for an early April release and that the development process for these drivers should have ended at the end of March. What does this mean? Likely we will see these new NVIDIA drivers come about within this upcoming week. Or rather the week of April 2nd to the 9th. With last week's launch of the NVIDIA Quadro FX 350M, 1500M, and 2500M it simply reinforces that new drivers will be imminent in order to officially support these new workstation GPUs. Tracing back the origins of NVIDIA's alternative OS drivers all the way back to 1.0-1251 -- seeing as NVIDIA has no clear strategy unlike ATI's monthly period -- the Linux drivers are most often released on Thursday, followed by Wednesday and Monday. Upon hearing or discovering additional information we will be sure to share it with our readers.

For those wearing red, the April emancipation will be the first driver this Spring -- which may prove to be beneficial if you have been tuning into some of our past articles.