NVIDIA

nouveau (Kernel-Provided Driver)

This is a reverse engineered driver largely developed by the community, with some documentation provided by Nvidia. It tends to perform well on older hardware, and is required to use a large portion of the available Wayland compositors.

OpenGL

The accelerated OpenGL driver is provided by mesa-dri. This is a dependency of the xorg metapackage, but must be manually installed when using xorg-minimal or a Wayland compositor.

Vulkan

Cards starting with Kepler (GTX 6xx) are supported by the Vulkan nouveau driver. Install vulkan-loader and mesa-vulkan-nouveau. Older cards may perform poorly or unreliably with Vulkan.

Xorg

The xorg metapackage pulls in the xf86-video-nouveau video driver. This will need to be manually installed when xorg-minimal is installed instead. You can also use the universal modesetting driver bundled with Xorg (this is the only option on Tegra-based ARM boards). When in doubt, it's a good idea to try xf86-video-nouveau first. This driver will likely perform better.

Video Acceleration

For VA-API, install mesa-vaapi. To ensure the nouveau VA-API driver is used, set the environment variable LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME to nouveau.

For VDPAU, install libvdpau-va-gl. Set the environment variable VDPAU_DRIVER to va_gl.

Reclocking

Only first generation Maxwell, Kepler, and some Tesla cards support manual reclocking. Cards past Turing (GTX 16xx) support automatic reclocking. Graphics cards starting with second generation Maxwell (GTX 9xx) do not support reclocking because the linux-firmware collection is missing signed firmware blobs needed to reclock these cards past their boot frequencies.

nvidia (Nvidia-Provided Driver)

The drivers provided by Nvidia offer better performance and power handling, and are recommended where performance is needed.

They are available in the nonfree repository and integrate in the kernel through DKMS.

To determine the correct driver package to install, first find the family of your card by running

$ lspci -k -d ::03xx

and matching the reported model to the list of Nvidia GPU codenames.

32-bit program support (glibc only)

In order to run 32-bit programs with driver support, you need to install additional packages.

If using the nouveau driver, install the mesa-dri-32bit package.

If using the nvidia driver, install the nvidia<x>-libs-32bit package. <x> represents the legacy driver version (580, 470, or 390) or can be left empty for the main driver.

Reverting from nvidia to nouveau

Uninstalling nvidia

In order to revert to the nouveau driver, install the nouveau driver (if it was not installed already), then remove the nvidia, nvidia580, nvidia470, or nvidia390 package, as appropriate.

If you were using the obsolete nvidia340 driver, you might need to install the libglvnd package after removing the nvidia340 package.

Keeping both drivers

It is possible to use the nouveau driver while still having the nvidia driver installed. To do so, remove the blacklisting of nouveau in /etc/modprobe.d/nouveau_blacklist.conf, /usr/lib/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf, or /usr/lib/modprobe.d/nvidia-dkms.conf by commenting it out:

#blacklist nouveau

For Xorg, specify that it should load the nouveau driver rather than the nvidia driver by creating the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nouveau.conf with the following content:

Section "Device"
    Identifier "Nvidia card"
    Driver "nouveau"
EndSection

You may need to reboot your system for these changes to take effect.