NVIDIA Releases 185.18.14 Display Driver

NVIDIA hasn't released as many Linux driver updates in May as they have in past months, but this week they are out with the NVIDIA 185.18.14 driver update. This proprietary driver for x86 and x86_64 Linux features a variety of bug-fixes, VDPAU enhancements, and better support for newer Linux kernels. Interestingly, NVIDIA hasn't updated their proprietary FreeBSD or Solaris drivers to this latest version, nor have they even been updated in a while.

Some of the fixes in the NVIDIA 185.18.14 Linux driver update include fixing Xinerama with WINE and other programs to prevent GLXBadDrawable errors, more graceful fall-backs if the NVIDIA kernel module fails to load, a DisplayPort problem when dealing with power management, memory management performance problems in a composited environment, VT switching problems, and many other fixes.

Specific to VDPAU are some corruption fixes with H.264 video decoding, improved performance in the VDPAU noise reduction algorithm, VDPAU validation for whether overlay usage is supported with blit-based presentation queue fall-back, and improved interaction between VDPAU and PowerMizer.

This new Linux release also adds support for new horizontal interlaced and checkerboard passive stereo modes. This release also adds support for multiple swap group members on G80 hardware and later Quadro GPUs.

The NVIDIA Linux 185.18.14 driver change-log and FTP download links can be found at NvNews.net.