NVidia

Foreword

There is no official Hyprland support for Nvidia hardware. However, many people have had success with the instructions on this page. Please read everything in FULL before asking for help.

There are three potential setups you can have with driver setup on Nvidia.

1. Entirely proprietary Nvidia drivers, often referred to as “Proprietary Drivers”
2. Entirely proprietary Nvidia drivers, except with the open source kernel modules, referred to as “Open Drivers”.
3. Nouveau open source drivers. A clean-room implementation of Nvidia drivers, referred to simply as “Nouveau”, and not to be confused with the “Open Drivers”.

For maximum performance and support with newer cards, running either of the first two setups is recommended as it contains some vital optimisations and power management support for newer GPUs.

According to Nvidia, the open source kernel modules are also recommended to be used by the architechtures Turing and Ampere. In short, this includes the 16xx and 20xx series of consumer cards and later. Your mileage may vary, so please try both of them if your card is supported by both.

If either of the proprietary Nvidia driver setups do not work properly on your computer, the Nouveau driver might work fine. This will likely be the case for older cards.

Proprietary driver setup

On Arch Linux and other Arch-based distros, we recommend using the DKMS variety of the kernel modules, as it will support all installed kernels on your system.

If you are only using the linux or linux-lts kernels on your system, you can also use the non-dkms packages if you wish.

For the entirely proprietary Nvidia drivers, you can therefore use the nvidia-dkms package. And for those wanting / needing to use the open source kernel modules, nvidia-open-dkms can be used.

These DKMS packages rely on having the “headers” package installed for your kernels of choice. So please make sure you have all relevant headers packages installed on your system. For example, if you have the Zen kernel installed, you must ensure linux-zen-headers is also installed.

Further Installation

The following packages must also be installed to ensure a smooth experience with the proprietary drivers.

1. nvidia-utils: The userspace graphics drivers. You need this for pretty much everything on your system, and we do not recommend running your computer without it. If you are also using the “multilib” or “lib32” packages for gaming, Steam, Wine, etc., then you also require lib32-nvidia-utils.
2. egl-wayland (libnvidia-egl-wayland1 and libnvidia-egl-gbm1 on Ubuntu): This is required in order to enable compatibility between the EGL API and the Wayland protocol. This should already be installed on most distros.

Early KMS, modeset and fbdev

As of Nvidia driver version 570.86.16, fbdev has now been enabled by default when modeset is also enabled. Therefore we simply need to enable modeset.

To enable it, create and edit /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf, and add this line to the file:

options nvidia_drm modeset=1

If you’re on Arch Linux, this step has already been done for you.

If you’re on NixOS, it is also enabled by default on all driver versions after 535.

Early KMS will allow the Nvidia modules to load earlier into the boot sequence. On distros using mkinitcpio, like Arch, you can enable it by editing /etc/mkinitcpio.conf. In the MODULES array add the following module names:

MODULES=(... nvidia nvidia_modeset nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm ...)

You can then rebuild the initramfs with sudo mkinitcpio -P, and reboot.

After rebooting, you can verify that DRM is actually enabled by running cat /sys/module/nvidia_drm/parameters/modeset which should return Y.

More information is available here.

Environment variables

Add these variables to your Hyprland config:

env = LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME,nvidia
env = __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME,nvidia

Finishing up

Install a few packages to get some apps to function natively with Wayland for the best compatibility and performance. See the Master Tutorial.

Reboot your computer.

Launch Hyprland.

It should work now.

Flickering in Electron / CEF apps

Electron and CEF apps flicker because:

1. They run in XWayland by default.
2. They don’t use the syncobj protocol by default.

To enable native Wayland support for most Electron apps, add this environment variable to your config:

env = ELECTRON_OZONE_PLATFORM_HINT,auto

This has been confirmed to work on Vesktop, VSCodium, Obsidian and will probably work on other Electron apps as well.

Other Electron or CEF apps have to be launched with these flags:

--enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland

For Spotify, Arch Linux has a spotify-launcher package in their official repos. Use that instead of the spotify package in the AUR. Afterwards, enable the Wayland flags by creating the file ~/.config/spotify-launcher.conf with these contents:

[spotify]
extra_arguments = ["--enable-features=UseOzonePlatform", "--ozone-platform=wayland"]

For Arch Linux, some CEF / Electron apps may also have respective flags files in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME. For example, VSCodium reads them from $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/codium-flags.conf while Obsidian reads them from $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/obsidian/user-flags.conf.

On NixOS, you can set the environment variable NIXOS_OZONE_WL=1, which automatically configures Electron / CEF apps to use Wayland.

As of Electron 35/Chromium 134, the “syncobj” protocol, which implements explicit sync correctly, is now supported. This resolves all flickering in Electron apps. However, it needs to be manually enabled by adding the below flag to any Electron/CEF app:

--enable-features=WaylandLinuxDrmSyncobj

Using this in conjunction with native Wayland on these apps should solve all issues.

VA-API hardware video acceleration

Hardware video acceleration on Nvidia and Wayland is possible with the nvidia-vaapi-driver. This may solve specific issues in Electron apps.

The install instructions are available in the README. However, a quick guide will be given here:

1. Install the package. On Arch, this is libva-nvidia-driver in the official repos.

2. Add this variable to your Hyprland config:

   env = NVD_BACKEND,direct

   See here for more information on this environment variable.

You can check the README to get it working for Firefox. There is also experimental support for Chromium, however there has not been much success.

Other issues

Multi-monitor with hybrid graphics

On a hybrid graphics device (a laptop with both an Intel and an Nvidia GPU), you will need to remove the optimus-manager package if installed (disabling the service does not work). You also need to change your BIOS settings from hybrid graphics to discrete graphics.

Flickering in XWayland games

XWayland games may flicker or present frames out-of-order in a way which makes them unplayable. This is due to the lack of implicit synchronization in the driver, and/or flaky explicit sync support in newer ones.

There are a few fixes:

1. Install the latest versions of xorg-xwayland, wayland-protocols and Nvidia driver. Ensure xorg-xwayland is at least version 24.1, wayland-protocols is at least version 1.34 and Nvidia driver is at least version 555. These enable explicit sync on the Nvidia driver and should avoid flickering.

2. If your GPU is no longer supported by the 555 or later drivers, install older Nvidia drivers which do not exhibit this issue. The last ones that work are the 535xx series of drivers. These can be installed on Arch via these AUR packages

Suspend/wakeup issues

On Arch Linux and NixOS, the instructions below are already done for you, but for others:

• 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 haven’t already.

For Nix users, the equivalent of the above is

hardware.nvidia.powerManagement.enable = true;

Still having issues?

If you’re still having issues after following this guide, you can join the Hyprland Discord and ask for help in the #hyprland-nvidia channel.