Hello! A friend of mine gave me their 3060 to replace my ancient R9 280X so I have a few questions to ask before I try swapping it over.
Even though most of the topics on this forum in regards to changing GPU brands are going from NVIDIA to AMD and not the other way, I was able to find at least something that might be what I need (as well as a glance at the Manjaro wiki for changing GPUs.)
From what I can gather, installing the 3060 raw is plug and play enough to either get to the DE as normal or use a TTY to run the command:
sudo mhwd -a pci nonfree 0300
Which should hopefully then be all I need to do to get it working.
Have I skipped any steps or misunderstood anything, or is this just fine to do without the system breaking?
Also I know that NVIDIA have very recently had open source drivers become an option. Are they any good, or are they still too “in the infant stage” and I should just go with the non free drivers?
On that note, I don’t think I need to uninstall any of my AMD drivers since I’m using all open source and have nothing installed from the AUR for them which was another thing I saw I would need to do from doing my research. Is this correct?
I’ll eventually want to switch back to an AMD card since this 3060 is a stopgap, and I think to do that all I need to do is remove the NVIDIA drivers and delete the xorg config file for NVIDIA.
Thank you for reading and I hope it was easy enough to follow!
This is the main topic that I was able to find of someone that had to go from AMD to NVIDIA that gave step by step instructions of what they did to make it work.
This is the wiki article I looked at. As you can see:
sudo mhwd -a [pci or usb connection] [free or nonfree drivers] 0300
is listed under the "Automated Indentification and Installation section of the page
sudo mhwd -a pci nonfree 0300is a valid command, although I’d say that the mhwd command may need some more work in the user interface department. Apparently it automatically identifies and installs the best non-free driver for the attached graphics card (signified by 0300 - I can think of many more things that would be clearer!).
On @Jangadance’s questions: Nvidia open source drivers are good enough to get a desktop running, but you’re not going to be able to do much with them. Proprietary drivers are probably the way to go. As you’re going from open-source AMD to NVIDIA there shouldn’t be anything to uninstall, and the only gotcha’s that might happen are kernel support (i.e. if you’re trying to use a kernel which the proprietary driver doesn’t support) and possibly Wayland support (which is still not quite there on Nvidia, so you should probably use X for now).
Well I finally installed it and it works! I was able to get into my DE and I ran the command just fine!
There are three small issues that have occurred though:
The first is that my GRUB’s resolution is no longer 1080p so it has to “refresh” once after I boot up to go from 1080p to whatever resolution it’s been set to since I installed the new card
Will reinstalling GRUB fix this?
The second is that my cursor that I installed from the KDE settings menu isn’t as vibrant and it’s the only colour thing that looks 'off", I imagine this will get fixed on it’s own
And the third is that opening programs and stuff is a bit laggy when opening. I’m not sure what’s the cause of this or if it will stop after the 3060 gets “settled in”
EDIT: The lag happens while just “doing stuff” too, for example the “Peek to Desktop” button in the task bar isn’t a smooth transition
EDIT #2: Did a bit of research and it appears that the laggy UI is just something i need to deal with on KDE with an NVIDIA card