They've already pretty much forgotten about compatibility, even though I don't think they've done optimizations. They're just doing different bad things with their OS.
Seriously, Win98 compatibility mode is just a joke these days. I've never seen it work with anything in a Windows 8 machine, even though I've managed to get it working most of the time back in the days of XP when backwards compatibility started becoming an issue.
I hope that NVidia doesn't just make a Linux-compatible library for their graphics cards, I hope they also port over their GeForce Experience software. There's some really nice features to it like seeing "optimal" settings for your games, telling you automatically when your drivers are out of date, giving you detailed information about your system, and especially ShadowPlay (if you've ever recorded gameplay, you'll see what I mean when you compare ShadowPlay to OBS).