NVidia

Foreword

There is no official Hyprland support for Nvidia hardware. However, you might make it work properly following this page.

You can choose between the proprietary Nvidia drivers or the open source Nouveau driver. Under the proprietary Nvidia drivers category, there are 3 of them: the current driver named ’nvidia’ (or ’nvidia-dkms’ to use with custom linux kernels) which is under active development, the legacy drivers ’nvidia-3xxxx’ for older cards which Nvidia no longer actively supports, and the ’nvidia-open’ driver which is currently an alpha stage attempt to open source a part of their close source driver for newer cards.

You may want to use the proprietary Nvidia drivers in some cases, for example: if you have a new Nvidia GPU model, if you want more performance, if you want to play video games, if you need a wider feature set (for example, better power consumption on recent GPUs), etc. However, keep in mind that if the proprietary Nvidia drivers do not work properly on your computer, the Nouveau driver might work fine while not having as much features or performance. For older cards, in order to use Hyprland, you will probably need to use the Nouveau driver which actively supports them.

Below are some tips to try to make the proprietary Nvidia driver work with Hyprland properly:

How to get Hyprland to possibly work on Nvidia

Install the nvidia-dkms driver and add it to your initramfs & kernel parameters.
For people using systemd-boot you can do this adding nvidia_drm.modeset=1 to the end of /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf. For people using grub you can do this by adding nvidia_drm.modeset=1 to the end of GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT= in /etc/default/grub, then run # grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg For others check out kernel parameters and how to add nvidia_drm.modeset=1 to your specific bootloader.

in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf add nvidia nvidia_modeset nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm to your MODULES

run # mkinitcpio --config /etc/mkinitcpio.conf --generate /boot/initramfs-custom.img (make sure you have the linux-headers package installed first)

add a new line to /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf (make it if it does not exist) and add the line options nvidia-drm modeset=1

More information is available here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA#DRM_kernel_mode_setting

Export these variables in your hyprland config:

env = LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME,nvidia
env = XDG_SESSION_TYPE,wayland
env = GBM_BACKEND,nvidia-drm
env = __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME,nvidia
env = WLR_NO_HARDWARE_CURSORS,1

Install qt5-wayland, qt5ct and libva. Additionally libva-nvidia-driver-git (AUR) to fix crashes in some Electron-based applications, such as Unity Hub.

Reboot your computer

Launch Hyprland.

It should work now.

Fixing random flickering, (nuclear method)

Do note though that this forces performance mode to be active, resulting in increased power-consumption (from 22W idle on a RTX 3070TI, to 74W).

This may not even be needed for some users, only apply these ‘fixes’ if you in-fact do notice flickering artifacts from being idle for ~5 seconds.

Make a new file at /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf and paste this in:

options nvidia NVreg_RegistryDwords="PowerMizerEnable=0x1; PerfLevelSrc=0x2222; PowerMizerLevel=0x3; PowerMizerDefault=0x3; PowerMizerDefaultAC=0x3"

Reboot your computer and it should be working.

If it does not, try:

• lowering your monitors’ refresh rate, as this can stop the flickering altogether
• installing the 535xx versions of the drivers, as later (545, 550) can cause flickering with XWayland
  • these are available for arch via the AUR here
• using the Nouveau driver as mentioned above

Fixing suspend/wakeup issues

Enable the services nvidia-suspend.service, nvidia-hibernate.service and nvidia-resume.service, they will be started by systemd when needed.

Add nvidia.NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations=1 to your kernel parameters if you don’t have it already.

For Nix users, the equivalent of the above is

# configuration.nix

boot.kernelParams = [ "nvidia.NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations=1" ];

hardware.nvidia.powerManagement.enable = true

# Making sure to use the proprietary drivers until the issue above is fixed upstream
hardware.nvidia.open = false