Hello,
I have a question: what NVIDIA driver versions are in the repos as of now?
I see there's a package world/nvidia which is 535.104.05. Is this the only one available?
Because there are also galaxy/nvidia-470xx-dkms and galaxy/nvidia-390xx-dkms.
So what's that? Can I really install version 390xx for example? (And how long will it be maintained?) Or are these packages just some deprecated leftovers?
P.S. Asking because I'm upgrading my PC and wondering which minimum/cheapest video card model I can buy (yeah, because they're expensive as hell).
Thank you.
P.P.S. Would be really awesome if the devs could maintain a couple of versions (like, an LTS one).
They are for older cards which are not supported by the current driver.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA#Unsupported_drivers
So, will I be fine simply installing
galaxy/nvidia-390xx-dkms or
galaxy/nvidia-470xx-dkms from repos (depending on the card model), right?
Define fine ?
I would expect the video driver will have basic functionally but if you wanted to play games, especially newer ones they might not work at all ?
https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/535.113.01/README/supportedchips.html
Don't buy anything not listed under "Current NVIDIA GPUs" and you won't have to worry about legacy drivers for now.
There's some pretty old cards still supported, "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750", 9 years old.
I don't know what your card is, but installing the wrong drivers is probably not "fine". Install whatever driver supports your hardware.
Also if you're upgrading your PC, I would highly recommend just getting an AMD card instead and saving yourself the headache.
Does it work better with opensource drivers than Nvidia with proprietary ones (for gaming)? Should I install anything else besides
xf86-video-amdgpu ?
I'm not in touch with the capabilities of hardware nowadays so I can't say. I would expect that the high-end NVIDIA cards are slightly faster in terms of raw fps, but I don't know if that's what you're looking for. I have an oldish polaris card and performance is fine for me. I don't do any heavy gaming or anything though. As for drivers, you just need xf86-video-amdgpu and the mesa ones. It's all on the Arch wiki (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMD).