Ubuntu – Install Nvidia driver for CUDA to use “GPU” option in Blender (ubuntu (13.10-) 14.04)

blendercudadriversgraphicsnvidia

Same question as on the Blender stackexchange site.

As a recap:

  • I have to install the nvidia driver but how to do it? (repository or manually? And I already had problems with both, as said)
  • My computer detects an other graphic card as the one that I have! (Maybe the reason why no proprietary drivers are purposed)

Every help is welcome!

It came out that the problem was that I have OPTIMUS. But in 14.04 it seems to be supported.

So, under 14.04 (on my external HDD) it detects my Nvidia driver OUT OF THE BOX!!!
But with Blender and cuda installed as said on this site and this driver:

enter image description here

I then installed Blender from this ppa as well as the CUDA driver from the same site.

Then, Blender detects the GPU!!!

GPU detected

But it says (Cycles mode with GPU rendering active):

Cuda >= 2.0 only supported

Even with Experimental on:

enter image description here

But on the site, thay say that Cuda < 2.0 is experimental:

Cuda < 2.0 is experimental

Should I wait, or could it help if I use another driver?

Best Answer

(Please see the update below)

For me, I had to:

So,

# Proprietary nvidia
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates

# PPA for Blender
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:thomas-schiex/blender

# Update..
sudo apt-get update

# Install
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current nvidia-modprobe blender

# Reboot

This was for Ubuntu 14.04, Blender 2.73, GeForce GTX 650 Ti.

Otherwise, using the ubuntu nvidia stuff, building blender from source, running blender from the downloaded tar ball, etc.. all failed.

UPDATE

This all seemed to work until I tried to render, but then I got

Failed loading render kernel, see console for errors

Then on the console:

 Cycles shader graph connect: can only connect closure to closure (image_texture.Color to output.Surface).
 Unsupported CUDA version 5.5 detected, you need CUDA 6.5.

Installing CUDA 6.5 involved completely installing nvidia-337 (otherwise you get a lot of cuda-6-5 : Depends: .... (=....) but it is not going to be installed. (as shown here) and instead installing nvidia-340.

To install this nvidia-340,

# nvidia PPA for v340
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mamarley/nvidia

# Update
sudo apt-get update

# install nvidia and cuda
sudo apt-get install nvidia-340 cuda-6-5

# Reboot

Other sites (AskUbuntu on Lubuntu, R Tutorial, etc) recommend installing from the .run, but I had no issue just using apt-get. The process did archive (rename) my xorg.conf file which disabled my edit file, but that was simple to revert.

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