A new Nvidia Beta driver has been released

May 19, 2015 07:46 GMT  ·  By

Nvidia has just published a new Linux Beta driver that brings a lot of new changes and improvements, not to mention support for a new mysterious GPU that hasn't been named.

Nvidia makes numerous driver releases, and the Beta branch is usually one of the most interesting. It's usually full of new features and all kinds of cool stuff that takes a while to reach the Stable version. The drivers are just one of the reasons Nvidia has much better support for the Linux platform, at least when it comes to proprietary drivers.

At any given time, there are a few active Nvidia-maintained driver branches, and all of them have a specific purpose. The Long Live branch usually land in repositories, and it's not updated all that often, but it's stable and usually reliable. The Short-Lived branch is also stable, but it's updated more often and it's not a likely candidate to the repos. The last branch is called Legacy and gathers drivers that are for very old hardware and they provide minimum functionality. None of the new changes and features in the new release is ported to this branch.

The Nvidia 352.09 driver for Linux is full of fixes

When Nvidia launches a new driver, it usually lands with support for a new GPU, and the same happened now, but it hasn't been named. It's likely that it support for a new GPU that hasn't been announced just yet. It can also be a mistake.

"Added the ability to configure the swapping behavior for quad-buffered stereo visuals. The driver can be configured to independently swap each eye as it becomes ready, to wait for both eyes to complete rendering before swapping, or to allow applications to specify which of these two behaviors is preferred by setting the swap interval. This setting can be adjusted in the nvidia-settings control panel, or via the NV-CONTROL API," is noted in the changelog.

According to the devs, a regression that affected the GPU fan status display has been fixed, support for G-SYNC with sync-to-vblank disabled has been added, G-SYNC is now used by default when the Unified Back Buffer is disabled, and various bugs have been fixed.

You can download Nvidia 352.09 Linux Beta driver from Softpedia for Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD. Please keep in mind that if you manually install the Nvidia driver, you might have to do it all again when the Linux kernel gets updated, provided that you will even be able to start the system. This is a Beta version, and it should not be used on production machines.