Ubuntu – Installing a different Nvidia driver

driversgraphicsnvidia

I am running Ubuntu 20.04 an ASUS TUF A15 with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660TI GPU. According to NVIDIA, the driver version for this GPU is 430. When I first installed Ubuntu, I installed 440. I'm now trying to correct that and install 430.

I ran sudo apt-get install nvidia-driver-430, and then did a reboot. When I examined nvidia-smi, though, it still showed the 440:

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 440.100      Driver Version: 440.100      CUDA Version: 10.2     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  GeForce GTX 166...  Off  | 00000000:01:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
| N/A   55C    P0     9W /  N/A |      0MiB /  5944MiB |      0%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

What is the appropriate way of updating this driver?

Best Answer

In Ubuntu it doesn't matter what the NVIDIA website says. It matters what the results of ubuntu-drivers devices are. Ubuntu is bundled with a tool named ubuntu-drivers which detects and installs proprietary graphics driver packages. It detects proprietary graphics driver packages with ubuntu-drivers devices. The sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall command replaces all the unnecessary guesswork by automatically installing the correct proprietary graphics driver packages if there aren't any proprietary graphics packages currently installed.

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