New NVIDIA Linux Driver Imminent

Yesterday the Santa Clara folks released the GeForce 8800GT graphics card. This PCI Express 2.0 compliant graphics card supports 112 stream processors, has a core clock of 600MHz, shader clock of 1500MHz, and a reference memory clock of 900MHz. The NVIDIA 8800GT also packs 512MB of video memory. NVIDIA has designed the GeForce 8800GT to deliver "awesome power" at a price of under $300 USD.

Complementing the GeForce 8800GT 512MB release was the NVIDIA ForceWare 169.04 Beta driver, to support this new GPU on Microsoft Windows operating systems. However, a Linux driver for this new graphics card has yet to be released. Their Linux development team wasn't able to deliver a same-day driver this time around, but this new 8800GT-supportive driver is their top priority, according to NVIDIA's Aaron Plattner.

No release date was given but you can probably expect the new NVIDIA Linux driver to be out by the end of next week. This driver will replace the existing 100.14.23 beta driver with the new product support, a couple of bug fixes, and perhaps a surprise or two.