NVIDIA Releases Another 180.xx Beta Driver

In roughly the past month NVIDIA has released five beta display drivers for the Linux operating system. NVIDIA began by releasing the 180.06 driver that brought PureVideo-like features to Linux in the middle of November. This driver was succeeded quickly thereafter by a 180.08 release that brought OpenGL 3.0 support. In early December, NVIDIA was quick to push out the 180.11 driver that brought a couple of changes, but that was replaced by the NVIDIA 180.16 driver that brought an updated VDPAU implementation. This afternoon NVIDIA has now released the 180.18 beta driver with additional VDPAU work.

The NVIDIA 180.18 driver updates the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix with relaxed restrictions on the number of references frames, fixing corruption that appeared in some video bit-streams, and fixing the VDPAU presentation queue when Composite was disabled. This beta release also fixes an X Server hang when rendering very large fonts and updating the NVIDIA installer to not conflict with the Compiz libgl.so extension library.

The NVIDIA 180.18 beta Linux driver can be downloaded for Linux x86 and Linux x86_64. No word has been given by NVIDIA as to when the NVIDIA Linux 180.xx series may leave beta.