Nvidia and Composite

Awhile back when the linux world made the leap to Xorg, I tried out Xorg composite extension. For those not in the know this allows for Linux to have real window transparency and drop shadows and a handful of other visual effects. Basically making Linux desktops more on par with Apple machines.

So, I tried it for awhile and found it annoying that when enabled, OpenGL applications wouldn't run because I was using a nvidia card and the nvidia driver while having support for the new composite extension had not figured out how to integrate OpenGL into it. Today I realized that Nvidia has actually released a driver that works both with composite and OpenGL. I must have missed the news blurb. You can read about it in the README that comes with the 1.0-8762 drivers.

One thing to note before anyone gets too excited is this only works with X11R6.9.0. Machines with a older version (of Xorg) are stuck using "AllowGLXWithComposite" which from my experience with the earlier nvidia drivers, break things.