Support for G-SYNC monitors is now included

Mar 25, 2015 19:02 GMT  ·  By

Nvidia has announced today, March 25, the immediate availability for download and testing of a new Beta video driver for Linux kernel-based operating systems. Nvidia 349.12 introduces numerous attractive features, such as support for lossless H.264/AVC video streams to VDPAU, as well as support for G-SYNC monitors.

According to the release notes, Nvidia 349.12 Beta video driver fixes a crash in the nvidia-settings tool, which occurred on systems with multiple X screens when the user assigned an attribute whose value was a display ID, introduces support for VDPAU Feature Set F to the NVIDIA VDPAU driver, and removes the "EnableACPIHotkeys" option.

Reporting of in-use video memory in the nvidia-settings tool just got a lot better, as it can now use the same accounting methods that are currently used in other utilities like nvidia-smi. In addition, a bug that prevented the changes of the graphics card’s fan speed to appear in the Thermal section of nvidia-settings control panel has been fixed, and hardware-accelerated decoding of H.265/HEVC video streams is now supported.

Several improvements have been added in nvidia-settings

The nvidia-settings tool received several other improvements in this new Beta release of the Nvidia video driver, such as command-line support for querying the targeted and current fan speed of the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), and a checkbox has been added in order to allow users to enable a visual indicator that tells them when the G-SYNC feature is active or not, which might be very useful when the monitor does not report when it operates in G-SYNC mode.

Moreover, Nvidia 349.12 Beta adds support for the "-background none" option of the X.Org Server, adds support for YUV 4:2:0 compression in order to enable HDMI 2.0 4K@60Hz modes, fixes an issue that caused multi-threaded applications to crash if multiple threads used the EGL driver simultaneously, and addresses a bug that made the Sync to VBlank function not work correctly with XVideo apps.

Lastly, a bug has been fixed in order to make the X driver to correctly interpret various X configuration options if the name of a display device had a GPU UUID qualifier. Download the Nvidia 349.12 Beta video driver for 64 and 32-bit GNU/Linux operating systems right now from Softpedia. Keep in mind, though, that it is not recommended to install a Beta (read: unstable) video driver on a production machine.