Double, double toil and trouble – NVIDIA drivers
This is a personal post mostly representing anecdotal information sharing my personal experience with the ASUS NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti graphics card tested exclusively under Ubuntu 22.10. It captures issues I’ve experienced, together with a few workarounds.
There are many reasons why NVIDIA produce proprietary graphics drivers. One popular held reason is that there is game-specific code in these drivers which are developed using exclusive rights to the game source code and extensive optimization. This type of information is confidential and valuable as it can give a company a competitive advantage over their rivals. Even if the performance gains are tiny, even a few extra fps may sway customers.
NVIDIA is starting to embrace open source drivers though. Since May 2022, NVIDIA has published Linux GPU kernel modules as open source with dual GPL/MIT license. This starts with the R515 driver release. However, the open source drivers lag behind their proprietary counterparts with benefits offered by the proprietary driver are not yet available with the open source equivalent. In particular, they include display and graphics features (such as G-SYNC, Quadro Sync, SLI, Stereo, rotation in X11, and YUV 4:2:0 on Turing), as well as power management, and NVIDIA virtual GPU.