NVIDIA Updates Legacy Driver For Decade-Old GPUs

Written by Michael Larabel in NVIDIA on 7 November 2013 at 09:27 AM EST. 23 Comments
NVIDIA
NVIDIA released yesterday the 331.20 Linux graphics driver update that stabilizes the R331 Linux driver with new features like EGL, modern Linux kernel support, a new frame-buffer capture library, and plenty of other features. Following that, NVIDIA has now released an updated legacy driver for the GeForce 6/7 series graphics cards that are the better part of a decade old.

The current mainline NVIDIA binary Linux driver supports from the GeForce 8 series and beyond while their newest (of several supported) legacy drivers covers the GeForce 6 and 7 series hardware. The GeForce 6 (NV40) series graphics cards were introduced in 2004, but NVIDIA is still updating their binary Linux blob for the hardware and the GeForce 7 (G70) GPUs. These new legacy driver updates are mostly about maintenance, but still can be important with the Nouveau open-source driver support being hit-or-miss at times.

With yesterday's NVIDIA 304.116 Legacy update, there's support for modern Linux kernel releases, an updated NVIDIA installer to detect collision with the EGL GLAMOR library, and updates for the NVIDIA OpenGL driver temporary file handling. Beyond the Linux x86 and x86_64 driver updates, the FreeBSD and Solaris NVIDIA drivers have also been released as version 304.116.

The updated NVIDIA Linux/Solaris/BSD driver with these minor improvements can be found at NVIDIA.com.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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