NVIDIA Releases 195.30 Linux Beta Driver

Before going off on a holiday recess, NVIDIA's Unix graphics driver team has put out a new NVIDIA driver beta release in the 195.xx driver series for Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenSolaris. Just shy of a month ago NVIDIA had put out the 195.22 Linux display driver that delivered on VDPAU improvements, support for NVIDIA 3D Vision Stereo, better DisplayPort monitor handling, and many other enhancements.

The just-released NVIDIA 195.30 beta display driver now delivers on fixed performance for KDE 4.x when dealing with text that hasn't been anti-aliased, GPU acceleration for many more X RENDER compositing operations, experimental GPU acceleration of the X RENDER CompositeTrapezoids, a VDPAU overlay-based presentation queue, and lastly "nvidia-settings --query all" now really reports all available attributes (something we had been after with NVIDIA to fix). The experimental CompositeTrapezoids acceleration support for the X Render extension can be enabled using "nvidia-settings -a AccelerateTrapezoids=1." While not officially mentioned in the change-log, the NVIDIA 195.30 Linux display driver is carrying the OpenCL libraries for properly supporting the Open Computing Language on the NVIDIA GeForce/Quadro GPUs with this proprietary driver.

We have not yet benchmarked these improvements to the X Render extension with NVIDIA's driver, but just today they have requested a new benchmark be added to the Phoronix Test Suite that is an improved version of Zack Rusin's X Render benchmark, which can already be found in our open-source testing software, and is being enhanced by NVIDIA's Aaron Plattner.

The NVIDIA 195.30 beta display driver Linux download links with other notes can be found at NvNews.net.