How to Install Nvidia Drivers on Fedora Linux

Install NVIDIA drivers on Fedora, the hassle free way.
Warp Terminal

Like most Linux distributions, Fedora does not come with the proprietary Nvidia drivers installed by default.

The default open source Nouveau driver works in most situations, but you may encounter issues like screen tearing and some stutters.

Fedora with Nouveau driver
Display issue in Fedora with Nouveau graphics driver

If you encounter such graphics/video issues, you may want to install the official proprietary Nvidia drivers in Fedora. Let me show you how to do that.

Installing Nvidia drivers in Fedora

I am using Fedora 39 in this tutorial, but it should be applicable to other Fedora versions.

Step 1

Before you do anything else, make sure that your system is up-to-date. You can either use the Software Center or use the following command in the terminal:

 sudo dnf update

Step 2

While Fedora does not ship with the Nvidia driver, you have the option to enable third-party repositories during its installation onboarding steps.

If you have not enabled it during setup, you can head to GNOME Software and head to manage the β€œSoftware Repositories” from the menu to proceed to enable the RPM Fusion repository for NVIDIA drivers.

RPM fusion for NVIDIA driver

Of course, you can manually add the RPMFusion repos to your Fedora system to install more programs like VLC or additional multimedia codecs as well.

For that, you can use the following command in the terminal:

sudo dnf install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm

Step 3

Now you need to determine what graphics card (or chip) you have in your Linux system. Pull up the terminal and enter the following command:

lspci -vnn | grep VGA
Video Card Lookup Fedora
Video Card Lookup in Fedora

Step 4

To proceed to install the latest NVIDIA graphics driver available in the RPM Fusion repo for the Fedora version you are using, enter the following command in the terminal:

sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia
installing nvidia driver via the terminal

Once you confirm it by hitting "y", it will download the packages and again ask for another confirmation. Approve it to proceed installing.

Optionally, you can enable CUDA support for the driver, which lets you check the stats for your NVIDIA card from the terminal using nvidia-smi:

nvidia smi

The command for it is:

udo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda

Step 5

To make the changes take effect, reboot your system and login.

Fedora with Nvidia driver
Fedora with Nvidia drivers

For Legacy Graphics Card

You can look up what driver corresponds to a specific chip. You can find a list of the Nvidia chips here. Furthermore, you can also use this tool to search for your device.

Note: Keep in mind that there are only three drivers available to install, even though the Nvidia list shows more. Old devices are supported by the nvidia-390 and nvidia-340 drivers.

To install the required driver, enter one of the commands into the terminal. The following command is the one I had to use for my card. Update as appropriate for your system.

sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia sudo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-390xx akmod-nvidia-390xx sudo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-340xx akmod-nvidia-340xx
Nvidia terminal installation
Nvidia terminal installation

Bonus Tip:

This is an optional step but it is recommended. When you add the RPMFusion repos, you get access to multimedia packages that are not available in the regular repos.

This command will install packages for applications that use gstreamer:

sudo dnf groupupdate multimedia --setop="install_weak_deps=False" --exclude=PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin

This command will install packages needed by sound and video packages:

sudo dnf groupupdate sound-and-video

Hopefully, you find this tutorial useful in installing Nvidia drivers on Fedora. What other Fedora tutorials would you like to see on It’s FOSS?

About the author
John Paul Wohlscheid

John Paul Wohlscheid

My name is John Paul Wohlscheid. I'm an aspiring mystery writer who loves to play with technology, especially Linux. You can catch up with me at: http://johnpaulwohlscheid.work/

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