NVIDIA Releases An OpenGL 3.2 Driver Update

Earlier this week NVIDIA had released their first beta driver in the NVIDIA 190.xx Linux series. The official change-log for the driver was pretty interesting as there were some new additions and other improvements, but unofficially, it delivered OpenGL 3.2 Linux support. The OpenGL 3.2 specification hasn't even been released yet, but we anticipate it will be announced by the Khronos Group early next month at SIGGRAPH.

Yesterday NVIDIA issued another beta driver in the 190.xx series, this time it's version 190.18. The NVIDIA 190.18 driver still contains the unofficial OpenGL 3.2 support, but it brings fixes so that the driver will properly initialize on NVIDIA mobile GPUs, a workaround for an X Server bug that was visible in KDE4, and a crash fix for nvidia-settings when showing GPU information within a Xinerama mode. The NVIDIA mobile GPU fix is important for this driver since the earlier 190.16 beta had a horrible success rate for actually working on the mobile GeForce and Quadro GPUs.

The NVIDIA 190.18 beta driver with all of its OpenGL 3.2 glory is available for x86 Linux and x86_64 Linux.