New Linux Driver Series ‘NVIDIA 378.09’ Beta Released

NVIDIA

NVIDIA Driver for Linux has reached the new short-lived 378 series by releasing NVIDIA 378.08 Beta a few days ago.

Here’s the changes since NVIDIA 375.26:

  • Added support for the following GPU(s):
    • Quadro M1200
    • Quadro M2200
  • Added support for the ARB_parallel_shader_compile extension to allow multi-threaded compilation of GLSL shaders.
  • Updated the X driver to ignore any Virtual Reality Head Mounted Displays (HMDs). See the “AllowHMD” X configuration option in the README for details.
  • The driver will now advertise GLX FBConfigs with no depth bits on depth 30 X screens.
  • Added support in nvidia-settings to view configured PRIME displays. To enable PRIME displays, see “Offloading Graphics Display with RandR 1.4” in the README.
  • Added infrastructure which enables the NVIDIA EGL driver to load EGL external platform libraries that add client-side support for new window systems, beyond the existing libnvidia-egl-wayland.so.1. For more details, see:
    • https://github.com/NVIDIA/eglexternalplatform
    • https://github.com/NVIDIA/egl-wayland
  • Added support for the following Vulkan extensions:
    • VK_KHR_display
    • VK_KHR_display_swapchain
  • Enabled OpenGL threaded optimizations by default in the driver. Refer to the “Threaded Optimizations” section in the “Specifying OpenGL Environment Variable Settings” chapter of the README for details. These optimizations will self-disable when they are degrading performance. As a result, performance should be unchanged for many applications, and increased for those that benefit from threaded optimizations and were not already forcing them enabled.
  • Fixed a bug that caused hangs when using the NVIDIA driver on 32-bit x86 systems running older Linux kernel versions (e.g. 2.6.18).

Download & Install NVIDIA Driver in Ubuntu:

For the official .run binary packages, go to the link below:

NVIDIA Unix Driver

Select download the package matches your OS type, and give its executable permission from the file’s Properties window (Permissions tab), and finally execute the file in command console.

To make the installation easy, “Graphics Drivers” team PPA offers current Nvidia driver series packages for all current Ubuntu releases.

Just add the PPA via the following command in terminal(Ctrl+Alt+T):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa && sudo apt update

Nvidia Driver PPA

Then you’ll be able to install NVIDIA proprietary drivers via Additional Drivers utility (378 series not available at the moment, check the PPA link):

install nvidia 375.20

Troubleshoot:

For some cards, there may be a black screen issue after installing NVIDIA proprietary GPU drivers. Try either setting NOMODESET in grub option, or removing the proprietary driver via command:

sudo apt-get purge nvidia-current

You may boot into recovery mode -> root prompt, or press Ctrl+Alt+F1 on login screen to get into command console.

About ml

ml is a part time stay-at-home dad who've been using Ubuntu Desktop for a few years. He writes in the free time and wishes to share some useful tips with Ubuntu beginners and lovers.