Drivere NVidia 180.29

Pentru cei interesati, au aparut noile drivere NVidia 180.29. Aceste drivere aduc multe imbunatatiri (vezi changelog la final de post).
De asemenea am facut testele deja traditionale pe care le fac la fiecare lansare de driver NVidia, rezultatul este ... hmm ... cum sa zic, ciudat. Graficele pot fi vazute la mine pe blog (vezi semnatura), iar rezultatele arata ca 180.29 este cel mai lent driver. DAR! Testele sunt inselatoare.
Am observat urmatoarele:
- cat timp rula glxgears, procesorul nu a ajuns niciodata la 100%
- la testele precedente, glxgears a utilizat tot din procesor
- jocurile (testat doar cu Tremulous) merg foarte bine, nu se observa nici o scadere de performanta

De asemenea, pe Internet am mai vazut pareri referitoare la faptul ca in X.org 1.6 performantele sunt mult mai bune, respectiv cei pe 64 biti sustin ca le merge mai bine grafica decat pe 32 biti.

Download:
ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/180.29/
ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/180.29/

Release notes:

Added support for the following GPUs:
GeForce GTX 295
GeForce GTX 285
GeForce 9300 GE
Quadro NVS 420
Added support for OpenGL 3.0 for GeForce 8 series and newer GPUs.
Fixed a bug that caused VDPAU to display a green screen when using the overlay-based presentation queue with interlaced modes.
Fixed a bug that prevented VDPAU from working correctly after X server restarts on some GPUs.
Improved VDPAU's handling of mode switches; eliminated a crash in its mode switch recovery code and a hang in the blit-based presentation queue.
Fixed a bug that caused VDPAU to crash when using DisplayPort devices.
Fixed a potential hang in VDPAU when using the blit-based presentation queue on systems with multiple GPUs not in SLI mode.
Implemented missing error checking of layer data in VDPAU's VdpVideoMixerRender function.
Improved VDPAU's handling of setups with multiple GPUs, if a subset of the GPUs cannot be supported due to resource limitations.
Improved GPU video memory management coordination between the NVIDIA X driver and VDPAU.
Fix potential hang in VDPAU when the overlay is already in use.
Improved workstation OpenGL performance.
Fixed an X driver acceleration bug that resulted in Xid errors on GeForce 6 and 7 series GPUs.
Updated the X driver to consider GPUs it does not recognize supported, allowing it to drive some GPUs it previously ignored.
Added the ability to run distribution provided pre- and post- installation hooks to 'nvidia-installer'; please see the 'nvidia-installer' manual page for details.
Updated the X driver's metamode parser to allow mode names with periods (i.e. '.'s).
Fixed a problem in VDPAU that prevented the overlay-based presentation queue from being used on displays connected by component video.
Fixed various problems in VDPAU that caused visual corruption when decoding certain MPEG-2 video streams.
Fixed a crash in VDPAU caused by certain invalid MPEG-2 streams, in 64-bit drivers for some GPUs.
Fixed an X driver performance problem on integrated GPUs.
Fixed a stability problem with OpenGL applications using FSAA.
Fixed an initialization problem that caused some AGP GPUs to be used in PCI compatibility mode.
Fixed a bug that could result in stability problems after changing clock settings via the Coolbits interface.
Fixed a problem with hotkey switching on some recent mobile GPUs.
Worked around a power management regression in and improved compatibility with recent Linux 2.6 kernels.