14 DAY TRIAL // Nvidia has updated the Legacy branch of the Linux drivers and developers have fixed quite a few issues. This is a driver aimed at older hardware, so if you just got your shiny and new Titan video card, this driver will be of no use to you.
Everyone is looking to get the most advanced driver for their video card, but not everyone has the latest video card. Nvidia knows this, and they provide a separate branch of the Nvidia drivers that are aimed at users with hardware that is no longer produced and that's been retired for a long time.
Like all things Nvidia-related, the drivers are somewhat shrouded in mystery and confusion. It's not just a single branch of drivers for old GPUs; there are actually several. As it stands right now, the Nvidia 340.93 driver is the most advanced for Legacy hardware, but it's not the only one. It will enable the use of older video cards, not for all of them. If you have a really ancient one, this driver might be too "new" for it.
Nvidia doesn't forget about its customers
Most of the legacy drivers usually have just a few changes and improvements so that they won't with new versions of the X server and new Linux kernel. Sometimes, more important fixes are being implemented, and this is just the case with the current 340.93 version.
"Fixed a bug that caused the X server to crash if an OpenGL application tried to allocate a drawable when GPU-accessible memory is exhausted. Fixed a bug that could cause an Xid error when terminating a video playback application using the overlay presentation queue in VDPAU," reads the changelog.
These are just a couple of the fixes. For more details about the Nvidia 340.93 release, make sure that you check the entire changelog below. This driver is aimed at the GeForce 8 and 9 series, so if you have anything older than this, the driver won't work.
As usual, you can download the Nvidia 340.93 Legacy Linux drivers for the 32-bit and 64-bit flavors from Softpedia. A version for FreeBSD 32-bit and 64-bit, and Solaris are also available.