NVIDIA has just announced that a new stable version of its driver for the Linux platform, 331.67, has been released and is now available for download.
This latest driver update arrives only a day after the previous Beta release, which caused quite a stir because it featured the option to overclock the video card. It may not seem like much but, in fact, this is actually great progress for the NVIDIA drivers.
The new feature is untested and it’s not present in the current NVIDIA release from today. Nonetheless, there are some interesting changes and fixes that made it, not to mention the support for a few new GPUs.
NVIDIA maintains a few concurrent driver branches that have very different purposes. For example, the current stable release, 331.67, is considered Long Lived Branch. It doesn’t get updated often, but this is the version that you will likely find in various repositories.
The Short Lived Branch, on the other hand, can also be considered stable, although it gets updated more often and features the latest improvements. You usually won’t find this particular version in the repositories, unless it brings something very important.
NVIDIA also maintains a few Legacy GPU branches that are designed to work with older video cards. Unless you are using something before the GTX 260 era, you really have no business employing this driver.
NVIDIA 331.67 driver is not one of the biggest releases made until now by the company, but it does bring support for some new GPUs: GeForce GT 705, GeForce GT 720, GeForce GTX 860M, GeForce GTX 870M, GeForce GTX 880M, and GeForce GTX TITAN Black.
Besides this, a few fixes and changes have been implemented. For example, a bug that could have led to crashes when running Left 4 Dead 2 with threaded optimizations enabled has been fixed and the makefile for the NVIDIA kernel module has been updated to work around a bug in older versions of GNU Make that prevented the NVIDIA kernel module from building correctly. In the meantime, a new version of GNU Make, 3.8.1, also took care of this problem.
Also, a bug that could cause some X clients to be disconnected from the X server when the screen is resized while RandR 1.4 display offloading is in use has been fixed, and a missing 32-bit compatibility library for libnvidia-fbc.so has been added to the x86_64 Linux installer package.
Check out the changelog for a complete list of fixes and improvements. Download NVIDIA Linux Display Driver 331.67 for Linux 32-bit and 64-bit.
