Nvidia drivers on Fedora for RTX cards

This article will cover how to install the current Nvidia drivers on Fedora.

As of authoring this article the current release of Fedora is 33. I am using RPM Fusion because that is the only way I have my RTX 2070 Max-Q (Refresh) working.

Adding RPM Fusion to the system

These repositories ship with extra packages that Fedora’s repositories don’t ship by default, the second command installs the non-free repository. The non-free repository contains packages that are propriety or are partially open source.

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

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

Installing Nvidia drivers.

Let’s update our Fedora setup before installing the drivers. If you end up downloading and installing Kernel updates, reboot the system.

sudo dnf update -y 

sudo reboot

Install the Nvidia drivers.

sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia

Installing cuda and nvenc, this is optional.

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

Once the drivers install, reboot the system. In the next boot you should have the Nvidia drivers running.

You can check if the Nvidia drivers is running by entering nvidia-smi command.

nvidia-smi

If the drivers work correctly, you should get an output like this, the output may very based on your GPU.

Fri Jan  1 16:07:42 2021       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 455.45.01    Driver Version: 455.45.01    CUDA Version: 11.1     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                               |                      |               MIG M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  GeForce RTX 2070    Off  | 00000000:07:00.0  On |                  N/A |
| N/A   54C    P8     8W /  N/A |    586MiB /  7973MiB |      1%      Default |
|                               |                      |                  N/A |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
                                                                               
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                  |
|  GPU   GI   CI        PID   Type   Process name                  GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                   Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|    0   N/A  N/A      1882      G   /usr/libexec/Xorg                 117MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2028      G   /usr/bin/gnome-shell              294MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      3709      G   ...AAAAAAAA== --shared-files      172MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

These drivers ship with the nvidia-settings application.