NVidia Bitmap Corruption and Beta 180.06 Drivers Report

[Lindsay Mathieson]

Have been evaluating  the latest nvidia beta drivers (180.06, 64 bit) and they 
seem to have fixed the screen artefacts that plagued KDE 4. I'm not seeing any 
issues with task bar glyph corruption etc.

However :) On my GF6100 I was seeing bad text corruption, particularly with 
Italic text. Apparently its due to the GlyphCache been enabled for the 6 & 7 
series of cards for the first time. The fix is to either disable the glyph 
cache:

  nvidia-settings -a GlyphCache=0

Which apparently will impact performance, though I didn't see any difference, 
or Disable sub-pixel hinting in the anti-aliasing settings.

Both worked, I'm quite pleased with the overall results.

The drives can be downloaded here:

  32 Bit
  http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_ia32_180.06.html

  64 Bit
  http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_amd64_180.06.html	


Additionally they include VDPAU - NVidia new API for accelerating video 
playback (PurevideHD for linux basically). I've seen very good reviews and 
benchmarks on this, but you need a 8 Series card or better and patches to 
mplayer to use it. No doubt support for this will work its way into xine (and 
hence kaffine), MythTV etc.

  VDPAU
  http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_180_vdpau&num=1


-- 
Lindsay
http://members.optusnet.com.au/~blackpaw1/album