14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA has released a new Linux driver for its products and the developers have added support for the latest GPUs that were just announced.
Unlike the support for the Windows platform, which usually consists of just a Stable and a Beta driver, the NVIDIA devs provide different branches for Linux. They are marked as Long Lived Branch, Short Lived Branch, Legacy, and Beta.
The Long Lived branch gets updated less often and it's the one usually present in various repositories. It might be considered stable, although it's one of the two with that status. The Short Lived Branch is also considered stable, but it's updated much more frequently. It's not usually made available in the repos, but it does feature most of the latest changes and improvements.
The Legacy version is used for very old GPUs that are no longer supported by the main drivers. It provides some basic functionality, but there are no new features or other changes. The Beta version is used by the devs to promote changes that are not quite ready for the other branches.
What's new in the NVIDIA 343.22 Linux drivers
One of the main reasons for this latest update from NVIDIA is the support implemented for a couple of new GPUs, GeForce GTX 970 and GeForce GTX 980, but there are a number of other improvements as well.
According to the changelog, a bug that prevented the "sync to vblank" setting from being honored for EGL applications has been fixed, a bug that could cause some OpenGL programs to encounter out of memory during a mode switch has been corrected, a bug that prevented the NVIDIA OpenGL driver from honoring the __GL_SHADER_DISK_CACHE_PATH environment variable has been fixed, a bug that caused disabled displays to be implicitly included in the target selection for some queries and assignments has been repaired, and a new attribute has been added to the NV-CONTROL API to query the current utilization of the video decode engine.
Also, a bug where the Exchange Stereo Eyes setting in nvidia-settings didn't work in certain stereo configurations has been fixed, a memory leak that occurred when destroying EGL surfaces has been plugged, support has been added for multiple simultaneous EGL displays, the support for G8x, G9x, and GT2xx GPUs and motherboard chipsets based on them has been removed, and the nvidia-installer has been updated in order to log uninstallation to a separate file from the installation log.
More details about this release can be found in the official changelog. You can download NVIDIA Linux Display Driver 340.32 for Linux 32-bit and 64-bit.