Nvidia driver exists, but the GPU is turned off

Ask Fedora
,
1

I noticed some very big frame rate drops, that should not happen with my nvidia GPU. I already installed drivers a month ago and forgot about it. But this whole time they were off for some reasong. nvidia-smi in terminal outputs this:

nvidia-smi
Sun Dec 28 16:35:37 2025       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 580.119.02             Driver Version: 580.119.02     CUDA Version: 13.0     |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                 Persistence-M | Bus-Id          Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |           Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                         |                        |               MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 ...    Off |   00000000:01:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
| N/A   45C    P8              7W /   50W |      61MiB /   6144MiB |      0%      Default |
|                                         |                        |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                              |
|  GPU   GI   CI              PID   Type   Process name                        GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                               Usage      |
|=========================================================================================|
|    0   N/A  N/A           63465      G   ...share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam          2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A           63714      G   ./steamwebhelper                         16MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A           63744    C+G   ...am/ubuntu12_64/steamwebhelper          5MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

And glxinfo gives this:

glxinfo | grep "OpenGL renderer"
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa Intel(R) Graphics (RPL-P)

I do not remember which way I installed the drivers, but I remember it was some video on youtube tutorial I followed.

2

If you installed those drivers using some RPM repository, rpm -qf /usr/bin/nvidia-smi
will show you the RPM this file is member of.

Then dnf list THIS_RPM will show you from what repository.

The recommended way to install nvidia drivers on Fedora is to use the rpmfusion repositories.

The fact that nvidia-smi works is a good thing: it shows that the driver is loaded and works.

You may have two graphic cards. See: lspci | grep -Ei vga\|3d

If this is the case, try to follow the rpmfusion Howto/Optimus