NVIDIA Updates Legacy 470 & 390 Series Linux Drivers, New Bump For 510 Series

While not as exciting as last week's NVIDIA 515 series Linux driver that kicks off their open-source Linux kernel driver effort, but today they issued a minor point release for the current stable 510 series as well as updating their prior legacy driver branches.

Pre-R515 drivers do not support the open NVIDIA kernel driver nor will they in the future. With today's NVIDIA 510.73.05 Linux driver the only change noted is a new configuration option for NVIDIA NGX to allow disabling DSO signature checking. Meanwhile the legacy driver releases are a bit meatier.

The NVIDIA 470.129.06 Linux driver focused on GeForce 600/700 "Kepler" series support has back-ported various GeForce Ampere GPU support such as for the RTX 3050 / RTX 3090 Ti / RTX A500 Laptop GPU / RTX A5500 Laptop GPU / others. There is also a NVIDIA frame-buffer compression (NvFBC) fix around Vulkan, image corruption with Blender is fixed, and various other bug fixes. This driver also can now successfully build against the Linux 5.17 kernel.

The third update out today is the NVIDIA 390.151 Linux driver that has a NVIDIA installer fixes and compatibility up through the Linux 5.17 stable kernel.

NVIDIA continues doing a nice job updating their older legacy drivers for new kernel support and other prominent fixes for the lack of having any robust open-source support upstream, unlike AMD's open-source driver stack. Nouveau on older GPUs is most practical just for the GeForce GTX 600/700 "Kepler" series where at least re-clocking can be achieved for having decent performance.