Difference between Nvidia Drivers and Hardware Video Acceleration

ajokeof · 2026-02-16 21:01:38

Hello everyone!

I'm new to arch and while searching how to game on it, i read that the Pascal Family of GPUs (i have a 1050 Ti on my old laptop) is discontinued, at least in the Arch Wiki is not displayed. So, i went to the official NVIDIA drivers web page, and downloaded the .run file for my driver and then deleted the package that i had downloaded via the archinstall method with "sudo pacman -Rncs nvidia-open-dkms", but i have a question which is, whats the difference between the libva-nvidia-driver and the nvidia-open-dkms. I left the libva-nvidia-driver package but i don't really know what it is.

Thanks in advance!

seth · 2026-02-16 21:12:14

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA - pascal sits between maxwel and volta
You'll need nvidia-580xx-dkms - if you installed nvidia-open or any nvidia 590xx driver you're probably running on sofware emulation and generally it's not a good idea to use the nvidia install script.
What's the output of

nvidia-smi

?

dimich · 2026-02-16 22:58:32

ajokeof wrote:

whats the difference between the libva-nvidia-driver and the nvidia-open-dkms.

nvidia-open-dkms is DKMS package which builds Nvidia kernel driver (module) from sources.
libva-nvidia-driver is a userspace driver for hardware-accelerated video decoding using Nvidia GPU. From upstream repository page:

This is an VA-API implementation that uses NVDEC as a backend. This implementation is specifically designed to be used by Firefox for accelerated decode of web content, and may not operate correctly in other applications.

Last edited by dimich (2026-02-16 23:00:00)

ajokeof · 2026-02-16 23:36:08

Thanks seth for the Reply!

When I installed arch via the archinstall method i selected the nvidia proprietary option, but it installed the nvidia-open-dkms 590.48.01-4 package, which i have deleted, but i see that i need to install the nvidia-580xx-dkms.

When i run the nvidia-smi in terminal it shows this

[asus@archlinux ~]$ nvidia-smi
Failed to initialize NVML: Driver/library version mismatch
NVML library version: 590.48

Thanks dimich for the reply!

I see, now i understand it better, i'm still learning and figuring the terms and everything out ahhaha
But basically, the libva-nvidia-driver is only used because of firefox correct?

Thanks again both for the reply!

seth · 2026-02-16 23:43:06

NVML library version: 590.48

pacman -Qikk nvidia-utils

but you might have libraries from the nvidia install script around in /usr/local?

ldd nvidia-smi

But basically, the libva-nvidia-driver is only used because of firefox correct?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Hardwa … ion_layers
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Hardwa … on_support

Arch Linux

#1 2026-02-16 21:01:38

Difference between Nvidia Drivers and Hardware Video Acceleration

#2 2026-02-16 21:12:14

Re: Difference between Nvidia Drivers and Hardware Video Acceleration

#3 2026-02-16 22:58:32

Re: Difference between Nvidia Drivers and Hardware Video Acceleration

#4 2026-02-16 23:36:08

Re: Difference between Nvidia Drivers and Hardware Video Acceleration

#5 2026-02-16 23:43:06

Re: Difference between Nvidia Drivers and Hardware Video Acceleration

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