I have a Dell XPS 9530 and onboard it has NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 as graphics.
Are these instructions correct for installing the video drivers? I had planned to use method #1:
Another owner of the same laptop suggested that battery life during sleep is longer when using the Nouveau drivers compared with the NVIDIA drivers. I actually don’t need the NVIDIA drivers, per se, so I want to cleanly uninstall them if I notice any increase in battery draining during sleep.
If I did dnf history undo for both of these steps here, would this reverse the blacklisting of the Nouveau drivers and would everything return back to normal?
Yes, genrally speaking the instructions are correct for the install of the Nvidia driver. As for the power consumption with the nouveau vs the proprietary drivers, you might see a small increase in the amont of power the computer uses because the Nvidia card will be enabled and when used it will draw more power than just using the embedded (intel video). You can disable the Nvidia driver by simply black-listing it per these instructions:
Is there a way to do the opposite – in other words set up the system so that it boots using Nouveau drivers by default unless we explicitly ask to use the NVIDIA driver?
99.9% of the time I would not need the NVIDIA driver.
No.
The graphics drivers are loaded once, at boot time.
You might be able to manually unload the nouveau drivers then load the nvidia drivers, but I would not attempt that.
The comments about power draw differences with the nvidia drivers is mostly a lot of fluff. Yes, using the nvidia gpu with the nvidia drivers may have a slightly higher power draw than with the nouveau drivers. However, that comes with the added benefit of much improved graphics performance.
Remember that a laptop with dual graphics is designed to only use the iGPU unless the graphics demand is high or the user actually requests use of the dGPU (nvidia). Thus the nvidia gpu is in an idle condition for the great majority of the time and the idle power draw is really no different between the two drivers.
Personally I use the nvidia drivers on my laptop and see very little difference in battery life.
Thank you. S’il vous plait tell me whether the dnf history undo command could be applicable in this situation? If the entire installation was carried out using dnf, it seems reasonable to assume that the installation could be undone with dnf history undo.
Yes, there is a way to do that at boot. You add another boot entry to grub that sets up the Nvidia drivers to load via kernel command line options. Leave the default boot option to use Nouveau.
Now, would I do this? … no
I would just run the Nvidia proprietary drivers all the time (as I do now) because the power usage really only increases when the accelerated graphic of the card are actually in use. You can see this by running nv (Nvidia Settings) with the proprietary drivers loaded. My power usage on the Nvidia (GForce RTX 3060) usually sits right at 9 WATTS unless I am running a game or a graphics processing application.
How to remove the nvidia drivers is only 1 dnf command sudo dnf remove \*nvidia\* --exclude nvidia-gpu-firmware
However, doing so would leave only the nouveau driver and as already noted the comments about power usage with nvidia only applies when the nvidia gpu is actually in use processing hardware accelerated graphica.
As I understand it, and from experience, excess power draw is not an issue for most users with a desktop workflow.
I believe your concern about power demand is highly inflated and you should try over an extended period to see if it is an actual issue with your normal usage.
Does the NVIDIA driver get used at all if I don’t use switcherooctl to launch anything?
Is this what is known as prime render offloading? This occurs automatically? If this occurs automatically, why is there a need for something like switcherooctl?
You have just named 2 different things that are both used. Prime render offloading is the automatic control that switches to the dGPU when the task is more than the iGPU can manage. Switcherooctl allows the user to specify use of the nvidia gpu deliberately. One is automatic and the other is manual.
Sometimes the user may wish to use the nvidia gpu even though the task may not do so automatically. Such as for games or other highly graphics intensive tasks, or just because the user wants to. Switcherooctl provides that capability. The automatic switching is sometimes not quite suitable.
I installed the drivers. For whatever reason it seems that the the battery does drain about 30-50% quicker in sleep mode when the NVIDIA drivers are installed vs. when they were not installed.
When I leave the laptop asleep overnight it gets down to 87%. With Nouveau drivers it was more like 91%. So it’s not a huge deal, but if there were a way to optimize this I would be interested.
Previously I had seen this discussion in the OpenSUSE forum about this topic:
Are you all sure there are no optimizations that can be done to reduce power draw in sleep by changing a modprobe file or something like that?
4% difference is insignificant and can easily be explained with a difference in the amount of time between the sleep & wake, or other factors that may vary. It is not a set value and only after a rigid testing regimen with a set sleep time and a set background activity during sleep can it be definitively said that this is a difference caused by the driver.
The background apps that may be running while sleeping also affect the power usage so unless the activity is exactly the same and the elapsed time is exactly the same every time there will always be a variance in power draw.
Anecdotal evidence is not definitive but with using scientific methods you might be able to define the actual values.
