NVIDIA 177.68 Beta Driver

Tuesday the NVIDIA 177.67 Display Driver was released and then yesterday the ATI Catalyst 8.8 Driver came out with OverDrive and CrossFire support. Today though we are back with another NVIDIA Linux driver release. Due to fallout from the 177.67 driver, NVIDIA has replaced it just two days later with the 177.68 Beta.

While the minor version was just bumped by one, this release has a fair number of changes. First off, the NVIDIA 177.67 driver has improved GPU memory management coordination between the X driver and OpenGL implementation, which NVIDIA claims will improve performance. Specifically, the performance should be boosted with the KDE4 OpenGL compositing manager. The previous release had introduced a number of enhancements to the RENDER extension in order to accelerate more operations and therefore provider greater performance, however, these changes were invasive. The 177.68 release will fix the RENDER corruption that was previously experienced on the GeForce 6 and 7 graphics processors.

Some of the other bugs that were fixed included GLXBadDrawable errors when running more than one OpenGL application with anti-aliasing (AA) enabled, GPU errors when killing the X server with an OpenGL application running, and dynamic display configuration to fail on GeForce 8/9/GTX GPUs failing when not attached to an X screen. The final official change in this release is added support for the GeForce 9700M GTS. The GeForce 9700M GTS is NVIDIA's newest graphics processor for next-generation gaming notebooks and does support Hybrid SLI.

The x86 version of the NVIDIA 177.68 driver can be found here along with the x86_64 version.