Hi,
I saw the 180.06 driver at this page and also someone noted that a beta version of the 180.08 driver is available here (which also adds initial support for OpenGL 3.0 - yes, an OT). Was just wondering - are these drivers officially out yet? I mean, when I go through the website and try to download a driver for my (or any other) card, selecting linux and 32 bit and so forth, I only get the 177.82 driver. So what’s the deal here?
Thanks,
Liad Weinberger.
180.06 will be the CUDA_2.1 beta driver. The toolkits (and other assorted packages) will be posted in the near future.
Yes well that’s not what I asked now is it? :) All I asked is if it is considered officially out yet, or not?
The 180.06 driver is publicly available, and therefore is ‘officially out’. 180.08, however, is NOT the CUDA_2.1 beta driver, and should not be used for that purpose.
K thanks. Am not interested in the beta driver (can’t do much with it till toolkit2.1 is out can’t I?). Was just wondering, if it is officially out, how come the driver selector on the main NVidia site still gives out 177.82 and not 180.06…
Anyway, I’ll keep my heads up for the update.
Well, I benchmarked some of my code using 180.08 versus 177.80 and the new driver gives me slightly faster results. The last stage of translating CUDA compiler output into actual machine code happens in the driver after all, so improvements to the driver may be beneficial even if CUDA 2.1 is not out yet.
It is a beta driver and the driver selector will only give you those if you click on the “Beta and archived drivers” link (I just checked, 180.06 is there).
tolmaion, thanks for the insight.
MisterAnderson42, great, thanks.
Alas, seems the 180.x driver series will not support my card (8600GT)…
Hmm, I have never had trouble installing drivers for notebooks under Linux. On windows people need to adjust .inf files, but as far as I know, all cards are supported in linux with the standard driver install.
Here I have a question: used 180.06 for a while under fedora8 kernel 2.6.25.14-69.fc8PAE. After some time repainting of windows, e.g. when switching windows or desktops, becomes noticeably sluggish, almost painful to watch. Already tried AllowSHMPixmaps, no help. CUDA itself runs fine, when I try some benchmarks. This was not the case with 177.80 (I am now using 177.82). Is BackingStore still being used for repainting obscured windows, when they are raised? What may I be doing wrong? Any magic incantations needed, to make 180.06 behave, or is is it just because it’s beta? Have not had any such problems in the past with any NVIDIA driver.
I don’t have a notebook… I have an Asus EN8600GT (Magic) card on my desktop. the 180.x series isn’t listed in the available drivers that support this chip (under beta drivers). They are listed for example for he 280 chip. Unless I’m getting the meaning of it wrong - this means that the 180.x driver series drops support for GeForce 8XXX cards (which is perfectly reasonable - it is a rather old card).
I’ve tried to use the new 2.1 beta with the 180.06 driver but can confirm the sluggish behavior after a time - particularly with firefox; it became unusable. I found a 180.11 driver that supports 2.1 CUDA, that seemed a little better, but that one too seems to have problems (notably with firefox as well, I believe). I am abandoning CUDA 2.1 for now, and going back to the 177.82 driver. I use openSUSE 10.3 on an x86-64 system. I don’t do anything that needs 2.1 yet anyways…
It is odd that firefox and X11 are interacting badly this way - problems with NVIDIA driver, or problems with firefox?
I also found 180.06 to be unbearably sluggish on Fedora 10 x86_64. I have not yet tried 180.17.
Edit: 180.18 seems much better. (it’s not listed on the website, but it’s on the ftp)
I gave 180.18 a spin, and at first I was very positively surprised. Then suddenly - I think I had happened to hit a webpage with an insane amount of flash - it went to a crawl so slow I at first thought it had hung. Patiently switching to the console and back again fixes it temporarily.