NVIDIA 190.32 Beta Brings New VDPAU Features

The NVIDIA 190.xx driver series already delivers on OpenGL 3.2 support and other new features, but continuing on with beta releases, NVIDIA's Linux engineers have released a new beta (v190.32) that brings a few more features.

The NVIDIA 190.32 beta was just released in time for the weekend and one of the two prominent new features is now support for controlling the GPU's fan speed from within their Linux driver. This fan speed control support for NVIDIA graphics cards is exposed through the NV-CONTROL extension with CoolBits.

The other big improvement with the NVIDIA 190.32 Linux driver comes down to yet another batch of VDPAU enhancements. The Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix now has some fixes for some older NVIDIA GPUs where there was screen corruption along the bottom edge of the video playback screen. More importantly, however, newer NVIDIA GPUs now support decoding MPEG-4 Part 2, DivX 4, and DivX 5 formats. In order to use VDPAU with these formats, a NVIDIA GeForce GT 230M, GT 240M, G210M, GTS 250M, or GTS 260M is required. For these GPUs there is now also a higher quality video scaling algorithm that's used by the driver. Owners of other NVIDIA hardware are unaffected by these VDPAU changes.

Lastly, for those that have any displays where the EDID information is correct but its checksum happens to be bad, the IgnoreEDIDChecksum option has been added to circumvent this problem.

Those interested in downloading the NVIDIA 190.32 driver for Linux x86/x86_64 can do so from this forum thread.