NVIDIA Pre-Releases Its 195.xx Linux Driver

While NVIDIA has been working on the 195.xx Linux driver since before last November, they have yet to officially release a stable driver in this series as of yet. Betas have been available and they even had to recall their recent drivers over a fan speed issue that could damage the system, but now they are finally getting ready to push out a stable release.

The NVIDIA 195.xx driver series boasts support for their upcoming GeForce 400 series / Fermi (not officially, yet), many VDPAU improvements, 64-bit FreeBSD support for their FreeBSD driver, many X Render improvements, and other fixes. There is no OpenGL 3.3/4.0 support, yet.

In preparations for this stable release, NVIDIA's Unix driver team has put out a 195.36.15 pre-release. Like in the past, this pre-release driver may end up being the stable version barring any last minute problems. Officially the 195.36.15 release just fixes the GPU fan speed problem, an X Server crash when the X Server was not on the active VT, and a bug that prevented performance level transitions on recent GPUs with SDDR3 and GDDR5 memory.

The x86 and x86_64 NVIDIA Linux download links can be found in our forums. NVIDIA has also made available 195.36.15 pre-releases for FreeBSD and OpenSolaris too that offer up the same set of changes.