# Nvidia GTX 970: nvidia-driver or nouveau?

## Catanduva

Today i bought a GTX 970 to play modern games. I installed Windows 10 for this so in linux i'll do everything else. Watch movies, series, listen to music, browse the web, etc. I'll not play any games on linux.

For what i see nouveau doesn't support hardware acceleration nor vdpau yet for the 900 series.

Source: https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix/

The 900 series is the last column (NV110).

Someone have a 900 series card and it's functioning properly?

My system is UEFI only. If i use nvidia-driver, what is exactly the problem with framebuffer? The only issue is booting to an ugly old school tty? After doing startx everything is ok?

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## Buffoon

nVidia blob has its own KMS now.

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## Catanduva

So i should disable in kernel KMS, install nvidia-drivers and i'm good to go?

At the Arch wiki it says this: "The proprietary NVIDIA driver (since 364.12) also implements kernel mode-setting, but it does not use the built-in kernel implementation and it lacks an fbdev driver for the high-resolution console"

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## Buffoon

I think Arch wiki is incorrect or outdated.

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## Catanduva

I'll try when i get home.

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## Catanduva

Xorg is working like a charm with nvidia-drivers, but i can't see anything before that. The boot is just a black screen, but it's booting. I type my username, password and then startx without seeing anything, but after booting X11 everything works just fine.

What can i do to see things before starting up Xorg?

Here's the dmesg:

```
[    4.552974] nvidia: module license 'NVIDIA' taints kernel.

[    4.552977] Disabling lock debugging due to kernel taint

[    4.558348] vgaarb: device changed decodes: PCI:0000:01:00.0,olddecodes=io+mem,decodes=none:owns=io+mem

[    4.558401] nvidia-nvlink: Nvlink Core is being initialized, major device number 250

[    4.558409] NVRM: loading NVIDIA UNIX x86_64 Kernel Module  370.28  Thu Sep  1 19:45:04 PDT 2016

[    4.581032] nvidia-modeset: Loading NVIDIA Kernel Mode Setting Driver for UNIX platforms  370.28  Thu Sep  1 19:18:48 PDT 2016

[    4.611934] [drm] [nvidia-drm] [GPU ID 0x00000100] Loading driver

[    4.657088] pmd_set_huge: Cannot satisfy [mem 0xf6000000-0xf6200000] with a huge-page mapping due to MTRR override.

[    5.224735] NVRM: Your system is not currently configured to drive a VGA console

[    5.224737] NVRM: on the primary VGA device. The NVIDIA Linux graphics driver

[    5.224738] NVRM: requires the use of a text-mode VGA console. Use of other console

[    5.224739] NVRM: drivers including, but not limited to, vesafb, may result in

[    5.224740] NVRM: corruption and stability problems, and is not supported.

```

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## Buffoon

My only box running nvidia blob submerged during our historic flood here, so I can't look at my log. I had nice hi-res console. What USE flags you had enabled for blob?

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## Catanduva

I managed to have the boot process with SIMPLE_FB on kernel (FB_EFI shows the black screen), but it's the old ugly low res framebuffer. At least i can see something.

```
[ebuild   R   ~] x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-370.28:0/370::gentoo  USE="X acpi driver kms tools -compat -gtk3 (-multilib) -pax_kernel -static-libs -uvm -wayland"
```

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## s4e8

If you use grub2, you can type "videoinfo" show available resolutions, then change GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX in /etc/default/grub.

 *Catanduva wrote:*   

> I managed to have the boot process with SIMPLE_FB on kernel (FB_EFI shows the black screen), but it's the old ugly low res framebuffer. At least i can see something.
> 
> ```
> [ebuild   R   ~] x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-370.28:0/370::gentoo  USE="X acpi driver kms tools -compat -gtk3 (-multilib) -pax_kernel -static-libs -uvm -wayland"
> ```
> ...

 

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## Catanduva

I'm using EFI stub booting directly by the motherboard (via efibootmgr).

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