New Nvidia Video Drivers for Linux Bring OpenGL 3.0 Support

One month ago Nvidia released their 180.22 video drivers for Linux OSes, which brought initial support for Linux kernel 2.6.28. Last night (February 11th) Nvidia proudly presented yet another improved version of their proprietary video driver for the Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris open source operating systems. The new version, Nvidia 180.29, offers full OpenGL 3.0 support for all GeForce 8 and newer graphics cards. It also provides support for the following GPUs: GeForce 9300 GE and Quadro NVS 420. The Nvidia 180.29 video driver was also updated yesterday, by the Ubuntu developers, in the daily build of the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). Among other features brought by the new Nvidia 180.29 video driver we can notice:

· Improved OpenGL performance on workstations;

· Added an error checker of the layer data in VDPAU’s VdpVideoMixerRender function;

· The VDPAU setup handling on multiple GPUs was improved;

· The GPU video memory handling coordination, between VDPAU and Nvidia X driver was improved;

· The X driver was updated to support some GPUs that were not recognized;

· The nvidia-installer received the ability to run various post- and pre-installation hooks;

· The metamode parser of the X driver was updated to permit mode names with periods (i.e. ‘.’s);

· Added power management workaround and better compatibility with newer Linux 2.6 kernels.