How are Nvidia drivers with Linux these days? (Late 2025)

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shanehiltonward@reddit

Excellent. Work great in Meshroom, WebODM, Agisoft Metashape, Blender, gaming, open vision computing...

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Everything actually seems to work better for me on Linux than it did on Windows. On Windows I constantly had to roll back drivers because they messed something up, but on Linux it's all been smooth sailing. I'm on CachyOS, so I have the latest kernel and drivers, and on KDE Plasma with Wayland. Everything runs great on my 5090 and 4090, and I haven't noticed any performance drops in any games I've played in both Linux and Windows.

The only issue I have which is mildly annoying is that my monitor is an LG C1, so a TV, and when I turn it back on and want to unlock the computer, the link between the graphics card and the monitor over HDMI doesn't re-establish unless I switch over to another TTY and then back to the Wayland session. It was the same when I tried X11, I think it's a known driver issue.

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siodhe@reddit

Linux + X11 + NVIDIA has always worked for me, with some small annoyances of decade-old cards losing support (but you can keep the old drivers), and occasionally NVIDIA would cripple some driver feature to match what Windows could do.

NVIDIA itself pisses me off at time. Try finding any documented-as-working 3D 4K monitor setup using NVIDIA. I'm sure it exists, but the company does not want to tell consumers about it.

Oh, and screw Wayland. No killer end user feature (security might be great, sure, but 99% of end users aren't worried about that), no core 3D support in the Wayland protocol. Don't waste my time - I'm not interested in replacing my 1980s-mindset window system (X), with another 1980s-mindest windows system written ironically after NeWS was. HDR is a pathetic goal compared to wanting monitor/driver 3D 4K support, something we almost actually got.

Now, Steam and some games still have issues - although other games run faster on Linux through Steam. I have one last Windows box in my house due to a stutter in VR in No Man's Sky on Linux, once I figure that out, I'll be switching that box to its already-installed Linux soul.

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XDM_Inc@reddit (OP)

Yes x11 is rock solid.but it's dated and for multi monitor setup it's detrimental.

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siodhe@reddit

Mine are set up like this physically - the :0.1 is a bit weird because it has higher resolution dpi in native mode, and I like native modes, and my Xresources are set up to use larger (pixelwise) fonts on higher dpi screens. (You know, if we were still using NeWS, which used real-world dimensions instead of pixels, this would be easier...)

     +--------------------+
     |                    |------+
+----|      :0.0          |      |
|    |                    | 0.1  |
| 0.2|                    |      |
+----+--------------------+------+

And this logical layout of the same screens for mouse motion, so that right/left movement in games doesn't leave the main screen (a 65" monitor)

              +------+
+----+        |      |
|    |        | 0.1  |
| 0.2|        |      |
+--------------------+
|                    |
|       :0.0         |
|                    |
|                    |
+--------------------+

So to reach the left and right, I move off of the top nearest edge of my main monitor.

Each screen is an independent set of 3x3 virtual screens (copy/paste is shared), with each monitor separately pannable on its own set nine virtual screens. Both side displays are covered in notifiers, alerts, stock watchers... stuff that doesn't move, but sometimes I'll double use one for a editor to make notes I can see alongside the fullscreen game I'm playing at 4K. Emacs is great for this, since I can tell my main emacs to make additional windows on the side displays or the workstation downstairs, so I can go down there and still have the same editor with all the same buffers loaded.

Maybe Wayland can do this too. But saying one can't get X to layout screen the way you want is often wrong. Granted, this was right up against the edge of what I could do - I'm pretty surprised I wasn't forced to have a screen at the top left origin (in the 2nd graphic).

But the point is that if I had Wayland with whatever it offers, I'd still want to lay these out the same way - so Wayland isn't offering me anything useful here. No killer feature. No reason to switch.

(Although if Wayland manages a 100% ban on input focus stealing, that would be one small feature of interest)

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XDM_Inc@reddit (OP)

As for me, what I'm working on more serious 3D projects or testing renders with a reference point. That's when I use my multi monitor and it will lock my speed down to the slowest refresh rate when using xorg. And what that will do is make tearing on my main monitor because it's designed for 175 and not 144

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siodhe@reddit

I understand. I'm actually pretty happy with 60 Hz (I'll explain why) - and I like to lock frame rendering to the same. The means I'm not seeing screen tearing in most application.

One major reason for being tied to higher rates is because a lot of games have a key misdesign where they only poll the keyboard (such an abysmally ancient mechanism now) once per rendered frame. So when your fps drops, games will start entirely missing keys that you hit too quickly, where both events fall in the same frame, meaning the keydown isn't even seen. Many current games still suffer from the same problem. High FPS is pretty crucial when you're stuck with something implemented like this.

Were I currently wanting (esthetics) or needing (to workaround misdesign) high FPS, I would really care about full support for multimonitors with different refresh rates. But I'm used to high resolution monitors having more limited top ends, because I'm 4K all the way, baby :-)

So, currently, Wayland support for heterogeneous refresh rates is not a feature I care about (I do care a bit about totally blocking focus theft). Which hearkens back to my core point: Wayland does not offer killer features that the majority of users would find worthwhile, and does not support all important features in X (and I'm not talking about line join mitres, either). Nothing I've read about Wayland is revolutionary. Nothing to set it apart as something you'd specifically want. End users (mostly) don't care about Wayland.

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PixelBrush6584@reddit

I got a 3090, and am running Fedora with KDE. 1. I haven’t tried anything with an HDR Display yet, so… think I have one, but I just never tried it with my main PC, so no idea. 2. Wayland is working amazing these days imo! Never had any problems! 3. No clue, never use Big Picture on the PC. 4. Unsure about this. I’m not really perceptive enough for this kinda stuff. Definitely haven’t had any flickering though.

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moopet@reddit

Same here with a 2080S. Wayland is rock solid for me, don't use HDR or Big Picture. Never noticed any vsync issues.

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XDM_Inc@reddit (OP)

I remembered playing wo long and when I played with Wayland the screen was flickering a ton

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C0rn3j@reddit

This was fixed with explicit sync in late 2024.

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ClangPan@reddit

There had been an issue with that yeah around version ~505 Nowadays tho it's working flawlessly for me, haven't had NVIDIA issues in a while

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endoparasite@reddit

I am using Wayland with 3060 for a year. There were minor issues and sometimes programs without Waylands support have minor issues but other than than that all is gut. Window managaers for me - KWin and Sway.

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XDM_Inc@reddit (OP)

I usually always stick with KDE anyway. Which usually has one of the most robust Wayland experiences besides gnome.

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endoparasite@reddit

Plasma desktop has been bit irritating recently. After some release autostart was broken. And when switched to Wayland I discovered that DE does not save virtual desktop for programs. My Thunderbird started and stayed on Desktop 4 but now it still appears on startup to active one. But ok.

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kongkongha@reddit

For me, much better than on win11. Less stuttering, less crashes. I can play all the games I want to. And ofc I do not support games with hardkernal.

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SunSunFuegoThe2nd@reddit

not good man... not good

rtx2080
ryzen 5 3600

generally i have no issues but steam games secifically require me to pre-load the shaders before every startup which is just stupidly long especially with counter strike 2, so i just skip it - then i have issues with frame drops, missing textures or messed up reflections.

it persists on my old arch install and my new cachyos install

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Time_Way_6670@reddit

Using NVIDIA propietary drivers on Fedora 42.. (1650 Super)

Using KDE Plasma on Wayland, works fine for the most part. Every once in a while you get a few microstutters. Not a huge issue. Sometimes hover titles in the panel appear all stretched out until you hover them again, this is a common issue. Overall, stable enough for me to use but definitely not as stable as say, an AMD or Intel card.

Haven't used HDR. Vsync seems to work fine in games, but I'm not sure if that's really the same as GSync. Also no clue with Steam Big Picture.

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OrganizationShot5860@reddit

Microstutters may be related to this.

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OrganizationShot5860@reddit

I am on a 4070, EOS and Arch. Driver version: 580.95.05-2

It's better now than it was only a year ago when there was a reoccurring bug that froze one monitor for me. That has since been fixed, for now I am only experiencing issues with GSP outlined in this thread. There is a workaround for it but I am hoping for a proper fix soon.

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Shhhh_Peaceful@reddit

I used 4060 Ti on Linux until recently, moved on because openSUSE Tumbleweed has really crappy support for NVIDIA for some reason.

The drivers themselves are mostly fine, Wayland works well on any driver version post 555. There are some known pain point like no hardware decoding in web browsers on Wayland (can be partially mitigated in Firefox), no 3D acceleration in virtual machines using qemu/kvm, etc.

My advice would be to stick to a tried and true distro which is known to release NVIDIA and kernel updates at the same time, otherwise the game of fixing black screen after updates gets old really fast.

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wichwigga@reddit

Secure Boot with Nvidia drivers is finicky when you update your BIOS

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murderbymodem@reddit

But my card is currently possibly showing signs of failing but it's also kind of discontinued in micro center so I won't be able to get another one of it except for the crappier models.

Microcenter having your card in stock or not has nothing to do with you being able to get a replacement or not. Check how long the warranty period on your card from the manufacturer is. I RMA'd an XFX 7900XTX last month and got a brand new replacement. The card vendors themselves keep stock of older models for replacements.

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XDM_Inc@reddit (OP)

Interesting because I do have warranty until March 2026. But one thing I cannot do is have down time so if they don't have it their physical store then I can't go through with it. Even though honestly I never really wanted this Tai chi model. I wanted the sapphire all along but when I was looking for it they didn't have any in stock for a while

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murderbymodem@reddit

RMA the card to ASRock if it is failing and still under warranty. You can always sell the repaired/replaced card if you don't want it?

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meutzitzu@reddit

Reset the counter, guys

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Quplet@reddit

I have Nvidia RTX 4070 ti with Nvidia-open, and it works well. No real problems. HDR worked well when I used it.

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Techy-Stiggy@reddit

HDR is still flaky sometimes Gamescope will corporate with you. Sometimes not. Sometimes what worked last week isn’t gonna work this week. It sucks.

The other parts seems to be mostly fixed you do have to go into steam big picture and tell it to ignore the GPU list last I checked

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Subject-Leather-7399@reddit

With nvidia, you will be leaving a lot of performance on the table when using Linux.

Here is 2 relatively recent videos benchmarking Windows vs Linux on both AMD and NVIDIA. You can see the performance dip for NVIDIA on Linux compared to Windows is quite significant.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DVHNXLwqP3w https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=77LBtP3nZwY

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XDM_Inc@reddit (OP)

I've seen one of those videos and I feel like its exaggerated especially on the higher end like the 90 class. You can Brute force performance issues.

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Subject-Leather-7399@reddit

Here is another video with similar results, this time, multiple distros were tested.

https://youtu.be/fqIjUddUSo0

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XDM_Inc@reddit (OP)

I see. I did remember hearing them say something about DirectX 12 being a little wonky with Nvidia, but even based on the charts of this video, the testing is all over the place. Sometimes it may be less sometimes may not be. I might have to "rent" an Nvidia card and run my own test. Because I usually play in 1440p when I do play games and as long as it can keep above 120 In most cases I won't mind the performance hit

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Subject-Leather-7399@reddit

There are a lot more videos like this and the results are pretty much always similar.

I seriously doubt, all of those who benchmarked have agreed to brute force performance issues.

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FattyDrake@reddit

It's not a ton. For the games I play (one of them a UE5 engine one) I did FPS measurements in both Windows and Linux and they were identical. I think there was like a 5 FPS loss with Cyberpunk 2077, but it was minor and I usually play that on the couch in front of a TV instead.

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Subject-Leather-7399@reddit

For AMD, there isn't much difference indeed.

For NVIDIA, the consensus online is that you can expect a drop averaging 20%.

I have a RTX 4090 laying somewhere in my basement, so maybe I'll try that myself. However, I am currently using an AMD 7900XTX.

I had a ton of problem with the RTX 4090 on Linux at the time that I just decided to switch to AMD and I never came back.

I didn't really experience much of a difference in framerate between the 2 cards except when raytracing is enabled. (NVIDIA is much faster at raytracing indeed).

However, the fact that I no longer had to fight with the drivers was worth it.

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FattyDrake@reddit

I realized I didn't mention my card. I notice relatively no difference with Nvidia. Minor drops in some games. Nowhere near 20%, usually between 1-5% if any at all.

I will agree Nvidia was a pain awhile back. They've seemed to improve over the course of this year.

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MarzipanEven7336@reddit

They’re fine, they’ve been fine for over a decade. It was your install that was fucked up.

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loozerr@reddit

The issues he listed were pretty normal. Most are fixed though and I can't say that radeon is night and day better as someone who went 3080 to 9070 xt recently.

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Dialectic-Compiler@reddit

I run NixOS with an MX150. It runs quite well.

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IceWaLL_@reddit

I have a 4090 and I use HDR. I haven't tested it in games but as for the desktop its identical to windows. (my monitor only has correct colors when in HDR. It is a aw3423dw. At least that's my experience)

honestly the only things that are missing for me is dx12 performance and I have heard that 5000 has some issues. Other than that it works great! I ditched windows 4-5 months ago and haven't looked back.

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SithLordRising@reddit

Better supported options with similar power, great for gaming, AI and stable diffusion Sapphire-NITRO-AMD-Radeon-RX-7900-XTX-Gaming-VAPOR Sapphire-NITRO-AMD-Radeon-RX-9070-XT-Gaming-OC-16G

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ScootSchloingo@reddit

I'ven ever had any problems with NVIDIA drivers. The only slight inconvenience is that for some reason my fans tend to be louder when on KDE compared to GNOME.

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FattyDrake@reddit

Nvidia works fine nowadays. Stick to KDE because their compositor is the easiest to use with modern GPU features, and use a rolling distro (Something like Cachy, even Fedora and Bazzite are generally up to date) because you always want to be on the newest Nvidia driver and associated packages.

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XDM_Inc@reddit (OP)

I'm rocking fedora KDE. I mainly only use KDE as it's my favorite distro

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AMidnightHaunting@reddit

I have a 5070 with Cachyos/Arch. KDE plasma, Wayland, and g-sync monitors. I can’t speak on HDR as my monitors have “fake hdr”, aka low nits, so I don’t use it. I haven’t had issues with g-sync or v-sync. I also run g-sync on all three monitors (all are the exact same monitor). My only issue is waking from sleep I have to turn my monitors off/on for kwin to see my monitors again (usually with Firefox left open, but occasionally it happens even with it closed).

When I used Bazzite, game mode worked fine. Did you mean game mode or did you mean Big Picture? They look the same, but they are different. If you meant BP, I cannot speak on this.

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Dominos-roadster@reddit

Aside from some small animation bugs on plasma wayland, it's alright. If you aren't on a high refresh rate display you wouldn't be able to notice it-even if that's the case some people are more sensitive. I'm dailying X11 and it does not have those minor issues.

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Morokite@reddit

Run on mint on a 3080. Everything runs fine outside of some DX12 games struggling(known issue that nvidia is allegedly working on). HDR is no go but that's pretty much across the board in mint. Most everything I play runs great though. Sometimes a bit better, sometimes a bit worse, but it's never a bad experience.

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lKrauzer@reddit

Working perfectly fine, go with >=555 if on Wayland, otherwise, stick to Xorg, and the only big issue now are DX12 games performance lacking

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AnotherBrock@reddit

I use KDE plasma on fedora with a 4080s. I have had no issues, it works the same it would on windows

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theaveragemillenial@reddit

I don't understand why you have made a Reddit post about something you can easily look up yourself.

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Time_Way_6670@reddit

People want up to date information. Linux moves fast, and with how the internet is now, most of the time people just end up looking for Reddit discussions anyway. So why not just write a whole new Reddit post? Makes sense to me.

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_sabsub_@reddit

Reddit is a forum isn't the point of it discussion? I don't understand why some people are so mad when someone just asks a sincere well written question.

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theaveragemillenial@reddit

Subs rules.

Not a support forum

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gedafo3037@reddit

It is clearly not a support question. It is a state of the union question.

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XDM_Inc@reddit (OP)

This is a discussion, I'm not asking for help in anything. I'm gauging people's experiences.

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Time_Way_6670@reddit

I agree, I'd rather help someone on Reddit than have them get out of date information via Google or ask AI which will be wrong. The whole point of Linux is to contribute and share... this is another extension of that.

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XDM_Inc@reddit (OP)

Im hoping to talk to people personally. Not outdated game specific threads from 9 month to a year ago

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mysterysackerfice@reddit

If it makes you feel any better, I'm glad you asked this question. I'm about to pull the trigger on a Lenovo with 4060 and was curious how it played with Linux. I have never installed Linux before and was gonna do more research on this today.

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theaveragemillenial@reddit

Use date flags in your search then.

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Cool-Arrival-2617@reddit

HDR was all but broken

I don't have issues with HDR, but I don't use it much.

Wayland was really unstable with Nvidia

This isn't a problem anymore.

and steam a big picture mode. The performance was really slow choppy and laggy due to no support of graphics card acceleration with Nvidia

I don't use Big Picture, but I believe some people have reported issues with it in recent driver versions still.

Hit or Miss Vrr/gsync that sometimes caused flickering in full screen games. So skipping to current date. Anybody have a recent Nvidia card knows if any of these issues were fixed?

It used to be very bad, then they fixed it, now it's back to being broken but it's not that bad. When the game limit the FPS to 60 and the image is very still (like in menus) I have a slight annoying flickering.

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XDM_Inc@reddit (OP)

I see. Thanks for the info, I remember playing wo long on my LG c3 TV and the flickering was unbearable in Wayland with my 3090 and I had to turn off VRR to get it to stop but then that gave it massive tearing

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SirLarington@reddit

I’ve got Arch running with a 7950x and a 4090.

Works fine for me. Except for the performance drop in dx12 games, everything is smooth sailing. Cannot comment on the HDR thing but everything else works flawlessly, especially VRR.

But, and that is a big but, I cannot use anything but Plasma. Gnome still has fractional scaling as an experimental option that totally fucks up game resolutions. Hyprland still has the issue with scaling of xwayland apps like Steam or Discord so that these apps appear extremely blurry. Only option is to disable scaling for those apps but you don’t have to do any of that with Plasma.

So with two 4k monitors and Plasma, everything works as expected.

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Farados55@reddit

I played rocket league and WoW on GNOME for a while a year ago. 1660 super. It's fine, no flickering. GNOME was more stable than KDE but I think now it's about the same.

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crazedizzled@reddit

Had no issues for years and years. I changed to a amd 6000 series a year or two ago, since my nvidia didn't have the outputs I needed. It was actually much more of a pain to get the amd working correctly.

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dfx_dj@reddit

If your Nvidia GPU is supported by your distro's packaged drivers then you're probably good.

If you need to pull newer drivers from Nvidia directly then things can go wrong in a number of ways.

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XDM_Inc@reddit (OP)

Indeed, when I tried to manually install drivers once the system soft bricked and boot looped into a black screen

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Careful-Major3059@reddit

i can say all of these things (other than hdr i dont have a monitor that supports it) work fine

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XDM_Inc@reddit (OP)

Good to know,what card you got? And distro?

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Careful-Major3059@reddit

2060 mobile, opensuse tumbleweed

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deadlygaming11@reddit

I have a 1070 and they are fine. The do their job but lack small bits of functionality that exist on windows so that isnt great.

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BranchLatter4294@reddit

I don't have problems with Ubuntu. Just select which driver you want to use in the driver settings.

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MONGSTRADAMUS@reddit

I have pretty limited experience with rtx 3080 and linux on both fedora and mint. It has been pretty good for me so far, but I only really play path of exile 2 and metaphor refanzio on steam, its been fine for me. I haven't looked at my exact average frame rate compared to what I had on windows 10. I think for the most part its good enough imo.

On fedora for both gnome and kde plasma I haven't had issues with wayland. For what its worth I am running 580.95.05 drivers I am not even sure I need latest drivers as my gpu is kind of old now over 5 years old.