Display Issues on F43 KDE 6.19.12

Hi all,

New Fedora user that came over from Debian and I could really use some help. The current Fedora 43 KDE installation fresh off the .iso download works perfectly for me (6.17.1), but after running the upgrades that bring it up to date (6.19.12), my system only detects one monitor and in a shrunken resolution. I have an Nvidia card but didn’t install any proprietary drivers, and was on nouveau before the upgrade. Now, though, the output of lspci -k | grep -EA3 ‘VGA|3D|Display’ is:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GA103 [GeForce RTX 3060 Ti] (rev a1)
Subsystem: ZOTAC International (MCO) Ltd. Device 6630
01:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation Device 2288 (rev a1)
Subsystem: ZOTAC International (MCO) Ltd. Device 6630

11:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Raphael (rev cb)
Subsystem: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd Device d000

I assume this means nouveau is not active, but why is this not showing any current driver info? I tried using akmod to run nvidia drivers but that just gave me a black screen on boot, which I see is a known issue. Is there an issue with nouveau as well? I’d at least like to be able to rely on one of them for now.

Thanks in advance, and apologies if this has been answered elsewhere and I missed it.

Install inxi
sudo dnf install inxi
and then see what cards and drivers you have
inxi -G

You could install the Nvidia drivers from RPM Fusion if you want, this is the recommended way to install the proprietary drivers.

Crazy, the output of inxi -G is:
Device-1: NVIDIA GA103 [GeForce RTX 3060 Ti] driver: N/A
Device-2: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Raphael driver: N/A

HOWEVER, right before attempting getting Nvidia proprietary drivers running, I ran dnf update and apparently needed a ton of them? Rebooted and now Nouveau drivers are active and everything looks fine now. Absolutely no clue why since I had just ran the update and rebooted to the new kernel version. Am I missing something or am I just insane

It is, and will be, fine until you try doing something that requires intensive graphics performance, such as watching videos, gaming, etc.
The nouveau driver does not enable hardware acceleration for graphics so if you need proper graphics performance with hardware acceleration the nvidia driver should be installed. With the nouveau driver all graphics rendering is offloaded to the CPU which will cause slowdowns of everything else.

How is that a driver then? That is like an avoidance mechanism. Are you sure? I thought the GPU was used, but at a substandard level.

The nouveau driver is a reverse-engineered open source driver that does not contain all the features of the nvidia proprietary driver.

‘substandard level’ is correct. It does not have all the same capabilities. For standard desktop performance it seems acceptable but not for graphics intensive usage.

Yeah, Nouveau is fine for most typical desktop activity in my experience, including video playback. Why I was fine substituting it for now.

1 Like

You can use either. If your use case does not demand higher performance then do not install the nvidia driver.

Should be the last update here, but the workaround for the black screen from this post of simply removing rhgb=quiet made Nvidia drivers work for me. Thanks for the thoughts.

Had you used this lspci -nnk | grep -iEA3 'vga|3d|Display' you should have seen a return something like this.

$ lspci -nnk | grep -iEA3 'vga|3d|Display'
06:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation GA106 [Geforce RTX 3050] [10de:2507] (rev a1)
	Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. [MSI] Device [1462:c979]
	Kernel driver in use: nvidia
	Kernel modules: nouveau, nvidia_drm, nvidia

And would have seen the drivers in use if they were loaded.