Im installing arch (dualboot) on my laptop it has gtx950m. I'll run kde desktop env. But I'm new to arch and I don't know which option to pick. EDIT= Please look at my newest post, I'm having a problem while installation
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Or in other words what are the drawbacks of not using proprietary nvidia driver?
So as the title says, I'm installing Arch and been wondering which drivers should I choose. (I'm am Arch noob so don't really know which is the best option).
The three options are: - nvidia (proprietary) - nvidia (open/source nouveau driver) - nvidia (open kernel module for newer GPUs, Touring +)
My question is which one is best for me. I plan to game and use PC for school. I have a 3070 and AMD 3700x.
If you can, please explain to me which one does what and their pros and cons.
Edit: thank you all for helping :)
I recently purchased a Lenovo IdeaPad 5 15ITL05 laptop and I installed Arch Linux on it. On my old laptop [Acer Aspire E1-571G] I used Nouveau and didn't care about NVIDIA drivers. It was working OK. However, with my new laptop I'm not sure if it's the right choice. I feel that the closed-source NVIDIA drivers might provide me with a lot more features than Nouveau. Which graphics driver do you suggest that I use? Nouveau, NVIDIA, or NVIDIA Optimus? What other useful GPU related apps should I install on my laptop to get the best graphics experience?
P.S: This is the output of neofetch on my laptop:
CPU: 11th Gen Intel i7-1165G7 (8) @ 4.700GHz GPU: NVIDIA GeForce MX450 GPU: Intel TigerLake-LP GT2 [Iris Xe Graphics]
Don't use nouveau. The performance is AFAIK, terrible at best, and pretty much defeats the purpose of discrete GPU. Since MX450 isn't a powerful card to start with, I suspect you get worse performance than the integrated GPU. You might as well disable the discrete GPU and use only integrated graphics if you use nouveau...
Read the Arch Wiki page: either use NVIDIA drivers only (recommended if most of the time you're plugged in), or switchable graphics and prime-run. That said MX450 isn't going to give you a lot compared to Iris Xe; maybe it's only good for some low-end gaming.
Looks like you have 2 graphics cards, one integrated and one dedicated. This is what Optimus is for, so you should use that. There is a great page about it on the arch wiki.
You have to change xorg.conf, blacklist modprobe.d, reinstall with pacman, etc. I wonder if you use some kind of automated script to switch between those two?
With latest KDE Plasma, if I use Nouveau things are MUCH faster (such as Resizing windows, tooltip effects, general performance)
If I use the package 'nvidia' from official repositories, these things are VERY choppy, laggy, low framerate..etc..
What's going on here? How can I fix this?
I have similar experience with GTX 670 and Quadro K4000M ( both GPUs use Kepler architecture ) on dota 2. I've never seen something so smooth before, dam so satisfying to watch. Nvidia driver is just so stuttery, don't know why, KMS not working correctly, not being able to force GPU to run at lowest frequency and more. Dota 2 runs faster at maximum detail though on Nvidia. I'm not buying anymore Nvidia GPUs after this. Waiting for more AMD laptops ( both CPU and GPU )
Anyone got any ideas? i really need help