The combination of the NVIDIA driver and the Athlon 64 should also work well with other memory-intensive applications like digital media. NVIDIA says the driver comes ready to work with Quadro, and is openGL compliant.
Andrew Fear, product manager for NVIDIA, says that each new driver is built to support every processor that NVIDIA makes. “Since it is unified, we can share 95% of our code very easily between operating systems,” says Fear. “You can get all the features on every OS, with full performance and stable operation.”
The company says that graphics performance in Linux has been greatly improved with this latest release. Comparison benchmarks done with the old 1.0 3127 and the new 1.0 4050 show a significant performance increase on Linux IA 64 architectures.
NVIDIA is proud of its Linux support, which it says is provided for by staff engineers and not third parties. The company has been praised by the Open Source community for releasing the source code for some of its Linux drivers. (as of the date of release, the source code is not available alongside the new drivers.)
The drivers are scheduled to be available for download sometime Tuesday from the nVidia website.
