NVIDIA 180.16 Beta Linux Driver

NVIDIA had released the 180.11 Beta Linux Driver, but soon NVIDIA has pushed out a new beta driver. This driver contains a few fixes, support for new GPUs, and an updated implementation of the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix.

The release highlights for the 180.16 driver release mention support for the following GPUs being added: Quadro FX 2700M, GeForce 9400M G, GeForce 9800GT, GeForce 8200M G, GeForce Go 7700, GeForce 9800M GTX, GeForce 9800M GT, GeForce 9800M GS, GeForce 9500GT, GeForce 9700M GT, and GeForce 9650M GT. However, support for some of these GPUs has actually been in the driver for quite a while.
The most significant part of this release, however, is the updated implementation of VDPAUWith this updated VDPAU specification, there is now support for more than four reference frames so that this NVIDIA PureVideo-like API can support level 4.1 reference frame limits on all of the GeForce GPUs. This should help in allowing more H.264 video files to play using VDPAU. However, the client video applications must now specify the reference frame allowance for VDPAU as well as the VDPAU memory usage. With NVIDIA's binary driver and VDPAU there is also fixes for corruption when decoding some H.264 streams. Another bug was addressed that prevented some VC-1 and WMV3 decoding from working on a few NVIDIA GPUs.

Another change is not painting the color key to presentation queue targets until the first frame is presented. In turn this should eliminate any lag time from when the video key is first displayed before the frame is visible.
The NVIDIA 180.16 Beta driver is available via FTP
for Linux x86
ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/180.16/

Linux x86_64
ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/180.16/