Well... it seems that 177.80 is good enough for a non-beta tag. I jumped on it with irrational hope. Pretty much nothing has changed for me since 177.76, but the scorecard bears repeating...
For reference, I have a Dell XPS 1730 with an 8700M-SLI. It's interesting to note that the windoze drivers for this laptop only recently upgraded to 175 --- from something really old and buggy... and that the update now comes from nvidia, and not Dell.
Anyways... The Bad:
- One core of the dual core CPU is completely swamped with interrupts coming from the card/driver.
- The GPU frequency is stuck at it's lowest (150Mhz) setting. This seems to be due to the card not detecting that the AC power is available.
- The external panel was detected and used as the first choice of display at one point --- it is no longer. Such a tease.
The Good-ish:
- The 2D performance has gone from pathetic to livable. Still not "good" considering the amount of transistors involved. A good hint here that helps is running "nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 -a GlyphCache=1" somewhere in your X startup.