NVIDIA Driver Question

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1

I am confused about how NVIDIA Driver works on Fedora 32. When I was using Fedora 31, my keyboard and mouse were not very responsive, so I installed the proprietary NVIDIA Drivers and the problem got solved.

Last week, I accidentally deleted all stuff on my hard drive and had to reinstall Fedora 32. This time my keyboard and mouse work well and I don’t need to install the proprietary NVIDIA Drivers.

I hear people say that I need to install the proprietary NVIDIA Drivers to fully utilize NVIDIA GPU’s power. Is that true?

2

It’s hard to say without any information from your hardware

But going forward, it’s possible that the nouveau driver (the driver backed by the FLOSS community that is available by default in Fedora) has evolved and fixed an issue that was experienced in your case. The main component that might improves things are the kernel, mesa and few others packages.

If you are satisfied by the nouveau features, you should consider to keep using it and avoid the proprietary nvidia driver.

The proprietary driver will improves things mainly in the 3D intensives tasks and accelerated computation (CUDA). and overall performances.

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3

Yes. As an example, my new PC has a moderately high end RTX 2060 card. I was disappointed that, with the nouveau driver, the darktable application could not use the GPUs because openCL was not activated. When I installed the proprietary nVidia driver, openCL was activated and darktable uses it, automatically.

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4

Depends. If you have a card older than the 6XX series, you would want to stick with nouveau as the proprietary drivers for them all are unmaintained. Also, if you own a relatively newer card - it is much preferred to use the proprietary drivers for better performance.

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5

My GPU is GeForce GTX 1660 gpu. After running the code:

sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia 
sudo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda

Do I need to do anything else to make sure that my GPU is using NVIDIA proprietary driver instead of nouveau?

6

Hi,

After rebooting, you check by issuing:

lspci -v

That its the nvidia drivers thats loaded.

Thanks Tom.

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7

Do you wish to use your GPU all the time or just for specific applications?

8

thanks for asking. i have installed the nvidia proprietary driver. i will need the cuda for some computational tasks.

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9

So, now I recommend installing clinfo. It is a cli program that will help you to quickly see whether openCL is active.

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