Another Week, Another New NVIDIA Linux Driver

It has not even been a week since the release of 185.13 Beta Linux driver, but today these Santa Clara engineers have pushed out yet another driver update for Linux. The NVIDIA 180.41 driver is this newest driver and it brings support for new Quadro FX graphics cards, improved power management on some systems, and bug-fixes.

The NVIDIA 180.41 driver introduces support for the Quadro FX 380, Quadro FX 580, Quadro FX 1800, and Quadro FX 3800 workstation GPUs. Improved power management can be found with the 180.41 Linux driver on select systems, such as with the Hewlett-Packard xw4600 workstations.

The fixes in this release include addressing OpenGL crashes while running Plasma with KDE4, OpenGL crashes when using a large number of texture objects, fixed time-stamp reporting in the GL_NV_present_video extension on SDI II with Quadro FX 4800 and 5800, and lastly is a fix for an X server crash when an X client attempts to draw trapezoids while RenderAccel is disabled.

The NVIDIA 180.41 driver can be downloaded for Linux x86 and Linux x86_64. More information can also be found in the 180.41 read-me.

We are not even through the first quarter of 2009 and we have already had about a dozen NVIDIA binary Linux driver releases so far this year. In comparison, NVIDIA's open-source xf86-video-nv driver has only had four real commits (in total there are six, but two of the commits deal with one commit just reverting the other) to its Git repository.

These four open-source NVIDIA driver commits in 2009 just deal with build fixes, adding in a missing PCI ID, and updating its man page. It's not as if NVIDIA has reached an open-source equilibrium, since their open-source stack doesn't even support 3D acceleration and has an obfuscated code-base (and there are still over 10,000 people asking for open-source NVIDIA support). The last official xf86-video-nv driver update came seven months ago.