NVIDIA 1.0-8178 Display Drivers
On December 5, a mere seventeen days ago, Linux gamers and enthusiasts were greeted by NVIDIA's Rel80 display driver launch for Linux. In the 1.0-8174 release was initial support for NVIDIA Scalable Link Interface (SLI) as well as the new nvidia-xconfig utility, similar to ATI's aticonfig tool they had unveiled months prior. There were also a few other improvements but what was expected in this almost five month void between driver releases was simply unimpressive. On this date we had published several articles pertaining to the 1.0-8174 drivers, and as the articles had stated, these drivers still had some issues mainly when it came to the initial SLI support. However, on the heels of the holidays, the green Linux team has delivered a surprising present and that is a new driver release. Bundled into the NVIDIA 1.0-8178 drivers is improved composite X extension, fixed detection of certain older TV cards, and miscellaneous other enhancements. Of course, the driver launch today is only minor, hence its version, but is there any performance gains or losses to be attributed to the latest set of drivers? We have wrapped up our testing and are here to share our results today. Below are NVIDIA's official notes regarding the 1.0-8178 drivers for Linux x86 and x86_64.
Version: 1.0-8178
Release Date: December 22, 2005
Size: 9.1MB (x86_64)
Highlights
· Fixed a problem where certain precompiled kernel interfaces were not recognized.
· Improved stability with the Composite X extension.
· Fixed a corruption bug with RenderAccel and the Composite X extension when using wide desktops.
· Fixed a problem validating HDTV modes on GeForce 6200.
· Fixed detection of certain older TV encoders.
· Fixed installation problems with Linux kernel source trees using separate KBUILD output directories.
· Fixed installation problems on newer Debian systems.
· Added support for NVIDIA SLI.
· Added a new utility 'nvidia-xconfig', which is a commandline tool for updating X configuration files.
To deliver our SLI performance numbers comparing the multi-GPU performance between the 1.0-8174 and 1.0-8178 drivers we used the system listed below.
| Hardware Components | |
| Processor: | AMD Athlon 64 3000+ @ 2.25GHz |
| Motherboard: | Tyan Tomcat K8E-SLI S2866 |
| Memory: | 2 x 1GB OCZ EB PC-4000 |
| Graphics Card: | NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT 128MB SLI |
| Hard Drives: | Western Digital 160GB SATA2 |
| Optical Drives: | MSI 16x DVD-ROM |
| Power Supply: | SinTek 500SLI 500W |
| Software Components | |
| Operating System: | Fedora Core 4 |
| Linux Kernel: | 2.6.14-1.1653_FC4 |
| GCC (GNU Compiler): | 4.0.0 |
| Xorg: | 6.8.2 |
Delivering our standalone single configuration driver results from the latest drivers is the i955X + 7800GTX setup with Pentium D processor.
| Hardware Components | |
| Processor: | Intel Pentium D 820 @ 3.36GHz |
| Motherboard: | Abit AW8-MAX v1.0 (i955X) |
| Memory: | 2 x 512MB Crucial Ballistix DDR2-800 |
| Graphics Card: | Leadtek PX7800GTX 256MB |
| Hard Drives: | Seagate 7200.9 SATA2 160GB |
| Optical Drives: | Sony DVD-RW & DVD-ROM |
| Power Supply: | Enermax Whisper II 535W SLI |
| Software Components | |
| Operating System: | Fedora Core 4 |
| Linux Kernel: | 2.6.14-1.1653_FC4smp |
| GCC (GNU Compiler): | 4.0.0 |
| Xorg: | 6.8.2 |
In both setups, we used a combination of Doom 3, Unreal Tournament 2004, Quake 4, and Enemy Territory to focus our findings. Throughout these four benchmarks, our traditional benchmarking methods were applied and with each of these games they were tested at multiple resolutions, Antialiasing, and Anisotropic Filtering techniques. Some of our usual benchmarks were left out of action today due to the only minor upgrades incurred in this latest release.