NVIDIA 180.35 Driver Update Brings Changes

It was just two weeks ago that the NVIDIA 180.29 driver was released for Linux and we talked about how NVIDIA had kept pushing out many updates in a short period of time. Well, they didn't stop with the 180.29 release. Available since last night is now the NVIDIA 180.35 display driver. Unlike some of their earlier driver releases that carried few changes visible to the end-user, the 180.35 release does have a few items worth talking about.

Starting off with the new GPU support, the 180.35 release is now compatible with the GeForce GT 120, GeForce G100, and Quadro FX 3700M graphics cards. There are a few improved OpenGL 3.0 bits in this release and that includes support for RG render-buffers and floating-point depth buffers.

Perhaps the most significant improvement in this release deals with VDPAU once again. The Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix was introduced late last year and is an excellent video API for Linux that can accelerate more operations on the GPU than XvMC. With VDPAU, we were able to play HD videos using a $20 CPU and $30 GPU.

The main addition in the NVIDIA 180.35 driver when it comes to VDPAU support is that VC-1/WMV can now be accelerated on all GeForce 8 GPUs and later. Previously with VDPAU these formats could only be accelerated on a few select GeForce GPUs. Beyond that, VDPAU has picked up a a "skip chroma deinterlace" option, allow VDPAU to handle correctly some forms of corrupt/invalid MPEG streams, and a few more VDPAU fixes.

The full change-log for the NVIDIA 180.35 display driver along with x86 and x86_64 download links can be found in this Phoronix Forums thread.