NVIDIA 180.08 Beta Driver Adds In OpenGL 3.0

Less than a week after releasing the NVIDIA 180.06 Linux display driver, NVIDIA has released a new set of beta drivers for their supported alternative operating systems. NVIDIA has released the 180.08 driver, which adds in OpenGL 3.0 support and contains fixes for their new video acceleration API.

Late last month NVIDIA had released a beta OpenGL 3.0 Linux driver that was based upon an earlier code branch, but the 180.06 release was missing this support for OpenGL 3.0 and GLSL 1.30. Now though the OpenGL 3.0 support is synced up with 180.08.

The biggest feature of NVIDIA 180.06 was the introduction of PureVideo features on Linux. VDPAU, or the Video Decode and Presentation API for UNIX, is able to accelerate video decoding for MPEG, H.264, VC-1, and WMV3 on the GPU and provide a number of other significant advantages over XvMC. We had published NVIDIA VDPAU benchmarks and they show the performance benefits of video playback with a NVIDIA graphics processor and slower CPU.

The VDPAU fixes in the 180.08 release include improved error handling/recovery and other fixes. This new driver for x86 and x86_64 Linux can be downloaded here and here.