The legacy support for old video cards has been extended

Nov 23, 2015 10:52 GMT  ·  By

The Nvidia developers have been quite busy these days, and they pushed a lot of updates for their drivers. The latest driver update is for users with old GeForce 8 and 9 video cards so that they can continue to use that hardware with modern OSes.

Even if it’s getting more and more difficult to keep track of all the Nvidia driver branches out there, at least the situation for the Legacy drivers is clear enough. The 340.96 version is clearly marked for the GeForce 8 and 9 series, so if you have a graphics card from one of these two generations, then you’re going to have to upgrade.

This particular branch of the Nvidia drivers is not all that famous, but there are a lot of users out there that still have older hardware, and they want to continue using that. Most updates for old hardware are about the support for the X.Org xserver. This latest driver upgrade also takes care of a nasty OpenGL bug.

Upgrade now to Nvidia 340.96

“Fixed a bug that could cause texture corruption in some OpenGL applications when video memory is exhausted by a combination of simultaneously running graphical and compute workloads,” the official changelog reads.

Moreover, support has been added for X.Org xserver ABI 20 (xorg-server 1.18), and this is the most important new feature. It’s worth pointing out that Nvidia also released legacy drivers on the same day for the GeForce 6 and 7 series, and those are marked with the 304.131 version. The changelog is identical with the one mentioned above.

Check out the announcement for a complete list of fixes and improvements. You can download NVIDIA Linux Display Driver 340.94 for Linux 32-bitand 64-bit. Keep in mind that you will need to manually install the drivers on your system. The procedure for manual installation is different from one distro to the next, so make sure that you check what you have to do before trying to install it.