NVIDIA 343 Linux Driver Improves EGL Support, Fixes Many Bugs

NVIDIA today has announced their first beta Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD driver release in the 343.xx driver series. As expected, this release drops pre-Fermi hardware support from the Linux mainline driver code-base.

As we have known for months, those with GPUs older than the GeForce 400 "Fermi" series, you'll need to use NVIDIA's 340.xx legacy driver from here on out until you're able to switch over to the open-source Nouveau driver. The NVIDIA 340 legacy driver will still maintain support for newer Linux kernel and X.Org Server releases along with prominent bug-fixes, but won't otherwise receive new driver features, etc. NVIDIA's now maintaining multiple legacy drivers and they've been doing a good job at still supporting these drivers for vintage hardware for several extra years.

New hardware supported by the NVIDIA 343.13 beta Linux driver is GeForce 830A and GeForce 810M support. Among the improvements in the NVIDIA 343.13 Beta is support for multiple simultaneous EGL displays, a memory leak fix for destroying EGL surfaces, a new NV-CONTROL API attribute to expose the current utilization of the video decode engine, a Unigine Heaven 3.0 shader bug fix, and other updates.

While this is the start of a new NVIDIA Linux (and FreeBSD and Solaris) driver series, the release isn't too exciting and mostly contains a mass amount of fixes. A thorough listing of all the fixes found in the NVIDIA 343.13 release can be found via the announcement posted to NVIDIA DevTalk.