Recommended way of replacing primary (single) graphics adapter

Support Graphics & Display
1

A while ago, I replaced my AMD Radeon 7870 with a Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti and also had to change the drivers. I’ve used mhwd on the command line for this and somehow I got it working after a few attempts.

Now, I want to check out the iGPU of the i9, since I actually don’t want to play games or something like that and I also want to get rid of the proprietary Nvidia drivers. But I’m not sure yet, so maybe I need to go back later or even decide to put the Radeon back in.

So I was wondering what the recommended way of replacing a graphics adapter/card with Manjaro would be?

Change the hardware first and then the drivers? Or the other way around? And which tools to use (and how) for that, assuming everything else stays the same? I’ve read the documentation, but most topics cover the initial installation or removal of existing fragments, but not the actual migration process from on driver/adapter to another.

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Hi @neo2001,

I’d recommend removing your existing drivers first, before even putting the new card in. Find out which are installed:

sudo mhwd -li

Mine shows:

sudo mhwd -li
> Installed PCI configs:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NAME               VERSION          FREEDRIVER           TYPE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
video-nvidia            2020.11.30               false            PCI


Warning: No installed USB configs!

So I’d have to remove the video-nvidia driver:

sudo mhwd -r video-nvidia

Then I recommend witching off the computer and swapping the graphics cards. Followed by rebooting into a Live ISO environment. Once booted, open a terminal, and enter a chroot environment for your installation:

manjaro-chroot -a

When successful, you can now install the GPU drivers.

Note: I am not 100% sure because I don’t own an AMD GPU. only nvidia, but as far as I gather, the open-source drivers are perfect for AMD GPUs while nvidia GPUs are more complicated, so install accordingly.

In my case, I’d have to install the nvidia drivers:

mhwd -i video-nvidia

(That will obviously change per situation.)

In theory, it should now be safe to reboot.

If not, it wasn’t me. Whatever ‘it’ is.

3

Hello @Mirdarthos!

Thank you for your detailed answer! I’m very sorry not to have replied sooner, but to be honest, I had so much on my mind, that I simply forgot about my post. :hot_face:

I also forgot about it, because I decided to stick to my nvidia card/driver for now. If I change them, I will test this and report back how it went. But the basic approach would be to first to use mhwd to remove the current drivers, then change the hardware, boot into a live USB system or login into the console and use mhwd to install the new driver. Then restart and boot into the changed system.

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That is correct yes! And cool, no problem, man!

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