NVIDIA 1.0-7667 Linux Display Driver Performance

Earlier this morning, NVIDIA publicly unveiled their new 7800 GTX (G70) GPU for immediate availability. Some of its features include CineFX 4.0, eight vertex processing units, improvements in the pixel-shader, and improved anti-aliasing. In addition, the NVIDIA G70 now uses an 110nm @ TSMC process, 80 million more transistors than the GeForce 6800, and runs at a 430MHz core / 600MHz GDDR3 clock speed. We will be bringing numerous 7800 GTX Linux reviews as the week’s progress, but in the mean time, we are bringing some coverage of NVIDIA's 1.0-7667 Linux display drivers, which were also released this morning. Although this driver comparison won't be as extravagant as our NVIDIA Linux Display Driver Performance Analyzed article, which was published last month, we will be comparing these latest drivers against the 1.0-7664 and 1.0-7174 packages. Our test setup we used today contained an NVIDIA 6600GT 128MB (PCI Express) and ran on a DFI LANPARTY UT motherboard.

The gaming benchmarks we'll be running today to compare the three different drivers are Unreal Tournament 2004 and Doom 3. Similar to our last NVIDIA driver comparison, we used dm-rankin and ons-torlan with the Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo (3334). However, this time with Unreal Tournament 2004 we are going to be using UMark Linux Beta 3 with 12 bots, to run the benchmarks. In the Doom 3 benchmarking, we used the standard timedemo1. In both games, we tested each of the different drivers under various settings.

Revision History:

Version: 1.0-7667
Release Date: June 22, 2005
Size: 10.8MB
Highlights

· Added support for GeForce 7800 GTX
· Fixed problem with certain flatpanels running at 1600x1200
· Fixed an unresolved symbol issue in libXvMCNVIDIA.so
· Fixed an unresolved reference to the symbol "gnu_dev_makedev"
· Worked around a bug in Java2D that was exposed in 1.0-7664
· Improved support for Quadro FX 4000 SDI

Version: 1.0-7664
Release Date: June 1, 2005
Size: 10.8MB
Highlights

· Added OpenGL 2.0 Support
· Added initial support for Xinerama + OpenGL
· Added support for the EXT_framebuffer_object OpenGL extension
· Added NV-CONTROL support for manipulating DDC/CI settings
· Added support for GPU clock manipulation
· Added support for NVIDIA Quadro G-Sync
· Added support for GeForce 6200 AGP
· Improved DPMS behavior on flatpanels
· Removed support for legacy GPUs
· Install NVIDIA OpenGL headers by default

Version: 1.0-7174
Release Date: March 31, 2005
Size: 9.0MB
Highlights

· Fixed performance problem when using AGPGART
· Fixed support for GeForce2 Integrated GPUs
· Fixed a workstation graphics stability problem
· Improved XRandR rotation support
· Fixed installation problems on some Linux 2.6 kernels
· Updated documentation