Xorg and nvidia-driver-173 ABI

[RW]

I picked-up the most recent xorg update a couple of days ago, and
since then X has been failing to start with the binary nvidia driver,
and is leaving the following in Xorg.0.log:

  (EE) NVIDIA(0): This video driver ABI is not supported.
  (EE) NVIDIA(0): Use the -ignoreABI option to override this check.

-ignoreABI doesn't help.

I presume that nvidia will eventually fix this for the current driver,
but I'm using the legacy driver port x11/nvidia-driver-173. Is there any
prospect of the nvidia driver working again on my hardware?

If the answer is no, would the nv driver benefit from a switch from
i386 to amd64.