Driver policy and Kernel updates

Hello!

I’m a bit confused. Which driver should I use for gaming under Linux? I read that the 358.x cause instability in steam and should therefore not be used. The 355 driver is older than the 352.63. So please give me advise what driver works best right now.

Another question: Does Nvidia have to implement patches for their drivers when a new kernel is released? Tried to upgrade from 4.3 to the 4.3.3 kernel but the gpu driver isn’t working. Cinnamon crashes all time but it’s no problem with kernel 4.3.0.

Thanks in advance!

Generally you use the latest available driver. It has the most fixes and improvements.

NVIDIA has no policy in regard to new kernel releases unless a new kernel has a new API (breakage) - in that case NVIDIA usually follows with a fixed driver several weeks later.

4.3.0 to 4.3.3 regression looks way too weird - I’m quite sure it’s not NVIDIA drivers’ fault.

Make sure you don’t OC too much, Michael.

The question for me is: must NV patch their drivers to support the latest kernels? It’s strange that 4.3 works with the 352 driver while 4.3.3 doesn’t. Didn’t do anything else than before to install the driver.

Can’t OC because the NVs driver don’t allow me to! It doesn’t stick after reboot sadly :(

Yes. Fortunately this part is open source, so distros that ship kernels that may not be supported yet (which is rare but happens sometimes on Arch Linux) can just apply a patch to the nvidia package they ship and it will work just fine. The patch that is needed is usually only a handful lines of code.

Example: 355.11 Linux 4.3-rc1 build error - Linux - NVIDIA Developer Forums

Personally I don’t have any problems with 358.16 and Steam and Gaming.