September 7, 2020

Fedora 32 -- Nvidia drivers

I purchased a big 4K monitor, and the "integrated graphics" that are part of my Intel i7 chip won't drive it at 3840x2160. So I bought a GeForce 1030 card with passive heat sink and display port and am using that. The performance is pretty bad, and at some point it hit me that it may not be the hardware. I am no doubt using the Nouveau driver that is the linux default.

Let's try the Nvidia driver

First I do this. In my case these were already installed and this did nothing. 
dnf install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm
dnf install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm
Then this command tells me what card I have: 
lspci -vnn | grep VGA
04:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation GP108 [GeForce GT 1030] [10de:1d01] (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
Apparently I need to choose between 3 different Nvidia drivers. This is shockingly hard to figure out, but the RPMfusion howto makes the statment that the akmod driver will work for any card 2012 or later. 
For recent GeForce/Quadro/Tesla execute:
dnf install akmod-nvidia
For Legacy GeForce 400/500 execute:
dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-390xx akmod-nvidia-390xx
For Legacy GeForce 8/9/200/300 execute:
dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-340xx akmod-nvidia-340xx
I go with akmod-nvidia, double check that I am running the latest kernel, and reboot.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org