Valve announced today that the closed beta for Linux is now beginning for those lucky few who were selected out of the 60,000 applicants. Those players will be able to start playing native versions of games like Team Fortress 2, but the performance may be a little spotty if the drivers aren’t up to date. It’s a good thing Nvidia is here with an update.

Nvidia released the new GeForce R310 drivers today for Linux operating systems. The GPU manufacturer said that the new Linux drivers “double the performance and dramatically reduce game loading times” for games on Linux.

The drivers had apparently been in development for almost a year with Nvidia, Valve and other game companies helping to optimize them for the release of Steam on Linux. Valve’s Doug Lombardi even had some nice things to say about it:

“With this release, Nvidia has managed to increase the overall gaming performance under Linux,” said Doug Lombardi, vice president of marketing at Valve. “Nvidia took an unquestioned leadership position developing R310 drivers with us and other studios to provide an absolutely unequalled solution for Linux gamers.”

The new R310 drivers support the newest generation of Nvidia GPUs – the GeForce 600 line. Users with Nvidia-equipped Linux systems are still encouraged to download the drivers as it includes support to all GPUs from the 8800 GT and above.

Linux users can grab the latest drivers here.