Lately I read always good news about Linux and big hardware and software vendors, but nVidia seems to overdone it -or not?- in their official announcement of their brand new drivers for Linux say:
“GeForce R310 drivers are designed to give GeForce customers the best possible Linux-based PC gaming experience – and showcase the enormous potential of the world’s biggest open-source operating system!”
NVIDIA today announced the latest NVIDIA® GeForce® drivers – R310 — double the performance(under circumstances) and dramatically reduce game loading times for those gaming on the Linux operating system.
The result of almost a year of development by NVIDIA, Valve and other game developers, the new GeForce R310 drivers are designed to give GeForce customers the best possible Linux-based PC gaming experience — and showcase the enormous potential of the world’s biggest open-source operating system.
Available for download at www.geforce.com, the new R310 drivers were also thoroughly tested with Steam for Linux, the extension of Valve’s phenomenally popular Steam gaming platform that officially opened to gamers starting today.
“With this release, NVIDIA has managed to increase the overall gaming performance under Linux,” said Doug Lombardi, vice president of marketing at Valve. “NVIDIA took an unquestioned leadership position developing R310 drivers with us and other studios to provide an absolutely unequalled solution for Linux gamers.”
The R310 drivers support the newest GeForce GTX 600 series GPUs, which have redefined gaming for desktop and notebook PCs by combining revolutionary performance and gaming technology features with an incredibly power-efficient design. Gamers with previous generation GeForce GPUs, including the 8800 GT and above, are encouraged to download these new drivers as well.
For an up-to-date third-party listing of games and applications that are currently in development for Linux, visit the Marlamin site.
For more information on how GeForce GTX GPUs are dramatically changing the way games are played and experienced on Linux, visit www.geforce.com. For more NVIDIA news, company and product information, videos, images and other information, visit the NVIDIA newsroom. The NVIDIA Flickr page hosts the entire lineup of GeForce product photos.
It is of great importance -for marketing- when companies like nVidia advertise the potential of Linux so strongly and this comes as a continue to other incidents that either accuse Windows 8 specifications or support Linux.
Installation
Fedora 18
I am wondering if Fedora 18 will ever be released. The original date was Nov 6, 2012 but it has been postponed for Jan 8, 2013 that is almost 2 months delay! Beta is coming (if no more delays) in Nov 27 but if you can’t wait till then and with your own risk you can grub a nightly build.
I reckon you to go with the Night Build and don’t try Alpha, as Anaconda is quite broken there. You might want to check on Fedora & Gnome 3.6 Test Day Wiki, about potential bugs with Gnome. You also need to check on Fedora 18 Bugs; most of them are fixed in Nightly Composes, but you have to take a closer look into bugzilla. If you are making a casual dual boot installation Fedora 18 will work, but in any case you have to make a backup!
In my Fedora 18 installation with X Server 1.13-7, Linux 3.6.6-3, nVidia drivers work out of box from rpmfusion.org and I am saying this because previous versions needed some extra work.
If you are new to Fedora you might also need to read this nVidia How To. Keep on mind that all Fedora alpha versions ship a kernel with debugging options enabled that significantly slows down the whole system.
Ubuntu & Ubuntu Gnome 12.10
Things are always better for Ubuntu users and you can just add X-Updates PPA for taking advantage of all new nVidia features. This PPA is considered stable, so you can safely use it.
Note: 310 drivers are currently on beta.