Easiest way to Install Nvidia 3D Graphics acceleration driver on Arch Linux

Hello guys. I used to be a huge fan huge fan of Fedora but now I am running Arch Linux as my Primary OS. I had a very rough time trying to get Nvidia graphics driver work on my Fedora 30 Box, but with Arch Linux, it was very simple to install it.

I will guide you through the installation process and verification. Nvidia Dedicated Graphics cards have the following general advantages over native Intel graphics card, Just to name a few:

• Provides a high-end DirectX 11-compatible graphics solution for Laptops
• Assured fast transfer and manipulation of 3D textures.
• Enjoy smoothest video and DVD playback.
• Fast transfer and manipulation of 3D textures
• Faster processing of very large textures resulting in higher performances when zooming and panning through high-resolution images
• Improved pipeline color compression
• It Offers enriched 3D user interface, increased application performance, and the highest image quality.
• Nvidia PureVideo Technology

My pc has GeForce GT 750M Nvidia Card, you can see from the screenshot below.

You must have Nvidia Card before using this tutorial, to confirm just run:

$ lspci | grep -E "VGA|3D"

You should get output similar to one below if you have Nvidia graphics card in your computer.

Make sure your System is updated

sudo  pacman -Syyu

Then install Nvidia tools.

sudo pacman -S nvidia nvidia-utils nvidia-settings xorg-server-devel opencl-nvidia

Once installed, confirm that the nouveau module is blacklisted.

$ cat /usr/lib/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf

You should get output saying

blacklist nouveau

If not, add “blacklist nouveau” to the file.

NOTE:

• It is not necessary to manually blacklist nouveau since the installation of nvidia will automatically do it for you.
• It’s not necessary to also generate xorg.conf file with the command nvidia-xconfig.

Reboot your computer and use nvidia-smicommand which reads temps directly from the GPU without the need to use X at all.

sudo nvidia-smi

To check GPU temperature:

sudo nvidia-smi -q -d TEMPERATURE

Get temperature used by utils:

sudo nvidia-smi --query-gpu=temperature.gpu --format=csv,noheader,nounits

Check to see if Direct rendering is enabled and working

sudo glxinfo | grep direct

My output is:

Encase you would like to revert back to the nouveau driver and mesa 3D acceleration, do:

sudo pacman -S mesa mesa-libgl xf86-video-nouveau

There you go.