This week NVIDIA began advertising their new "R310" Linux graphics driver that "delivers [a] massive performance boost to Linux gaming" as a result of Valve releasing their Steam Linux Beta. The NVIDIA 310.xx Linux graphics driver not only improves the performance for Valve's Source Engine games, but many Linux OpenGL games. In this article are benchmarks from three graphics cards to highlight the optimizations.

NVIDIA's 310 Linux driver beta actually came last month with the performance enhancements and multi-threaded OpenGL support, but it wasn't until Tuesday when the Valve beta got underway that NVIDIA issued the press release. Last month I did some early NVIDIA 310 Linux benchmarks and of the threaded OpenGL support. The 310 driver was faster than earlier series, but the experimental threaded OpenGL support wasn't always delivering better results.