Arch wiki now suggests nvidia-open

thenodger · 2025-08-18 11:59:12

Sorry if this isn't the right section for this post, I was looking at all of them and I couldn't decide, this one seems the closest to me.

I'm gonna reinstall Arch soon (hopefully), and I noticed something different; for my GPU, the Arch wiki now suggests I should install nvidia-open instead of nvidia I'm currently running. Is this okay for gaming i.e. is there a performance difference between them?

Thank you. Have a good day everyone.

Whoracle · 2025-08-18 12:02:35

nvidia-open is the new(ish) driver by nvidia, and is what nvidia recommends/supports, for the newer generations of cards at least. It's as good if not better (because it's newer) for gaming than nvidia was. You might be conflating it with noveau, the open-source implementation of nvidia drivers.

thenodger · 2025-08-18 14:11:46

Whoracle wrote:

You might be conflating it with noveau

Thanks for the response, incredibly useful. I'm not conflating it with noveau, I know nvidia-open is official from NVIDIA, but I was just worried it would perform worse for the foreseeable future.

Whoracle · 2025-08-18 14:13:34

In that case: Not that I noticed. Been running nvidia-open for a while now. And on my system with a 3080FE there are no noticeable performance differences. Didn't benchmark in-depth, though, fwiw.

Scimmia · 2025-08-18 14:15:34

Did you see the link in the status column? Thw wiki doesn't suggest it, it lists it and says that NVIDIA recommends it, and the article does mention performance.

Succulent of your garden · 2025-08-18 23:16:20

Also check your architecture gpu, because as far as I know only blackwell based have the open source user space driver, not sure about ampere.

Scimmia · 2025-08-19 01:48:11

What open source userspace driver would you be referring to? If you using nvidia or nvidia-open, you're using the closed, proprietary userspace AFAIK.

Last edited by Scimmia (2025-08-19 01:48:23)

seth · 2025-08-19 07:38:25

Turing and newer (w/ the exception of Ada - the only female is excluded… not a good look, nvidia ) support nvidia-open, Blackwell (and likely future chips) *only* works w/ nvidia-open and all of them work along the proprietary, closed source nvidia GL stack from nvidia-utils and nvidia-open only works w/ GSP enabled (default and I' assume you cannot actually disable it and the parameter would just be ignored)
Their performance is supposed to be equivalent, the difference is that nvidia-open moves the proprietary black magic into the firmware (GSP) - so you should go by stability and since nvidia-open might one day become in-tree, bias towards that for less hassle.

Succulent of your garden · 2025-08-19 11:15:25

Scimmia wrote:

What open source userspace driver would you be referring to? If you using nvidia or nvidia-open, you're using the closed, proprietary userspace AFAIK.

you are right, my bad so deeply sorry for that, I don't know how that get's into my mind and became truth somehow[the whole nvidia driver history is a mess, with the APIs gpu history also]. Maybe the improvements in nvk also made me believe that somehow. Big and long sniff because there is no good open source driver yet. Also I wrote that when I was going literally go to sleep, keyboard goes click click click and went to bed and be 8 hours 404.

Last edited by Succulent of your garden (2025-08-19 11:18:24)

Arch Linux

#1 2025-08-18 11:59:12

Arch wiki now suggests nvidia-open

#2 2025-08-18 12:02:35

Re: Arch wiki now suggests nvidia-open

#3 2025-08-18 14:11:46

Re: Arch wiki now suggests nvidia-open

#4 2025-08-18 14:13:34

Re: Arch wiki now suggests nvidia-open

#5 2025-08-18 14:15:34

Re: Arch wiki now suggests nvidia-open

#6 2025-08-18 23:16:20

Re: Arch wiki now suggests nvidia-open

#7 2025-08-19 01:48:11

Re: Arch wiki now suggests nvidia-open

#8 2025-08-19 07:38:25

Re: Arch wiki now suggests nvidia-open

#9 2025-08-19 11:15:25

Re: Arch wiki now suggests nvidia-open

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