How to install Nvidia proprietary drivers in Fedora 38

May 26, 2023

Fedora 38 by default comes with open source drivers for the Nvidia GPU. The open source drive is called nouveau. But this does not work well if you like to play games on your computer. You need to install the proprietary drivers from Nvidia to be able to play games properly. This post will show you how to do that

How to know what kind of drivers you are using?

Open a terminal and run

lsmod | grep nouveau

If this shows any output, then you are using the open source driver.

On the other hand, the below command will show output if you are using Nvidia drivers

lsmod | grep -i nvidia

This is a sample output

➜  ~ lsmod | grep -i nvidia
nvidia_drm             94208  2
nvidia_modeset       1290240  3 nvidia_drm
nvidia_uvm           3219456  0
nvidia              55853056  117 nvidia_uvm,nvidia_modeset
video                  77824  3 asus_wmi,i915,nvidia_modeset

Once you know for sure that you are using the open source ( nouveau ) drivers, you continue to the next section

Updating the system

Before we continue, we should update our system to the latest. Open a terminal and run

sudo dnf makecache && sudo dnf update

Press Y and Enter to update.

Once the updates are done, reboot your computer

Installing RPM Fusion

NVIDIA proprietary drivers are not available in the default repositories, we need to enable the RPM Fusion repository to be able to install them. Open a terminal and run:

The free repository

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

Now the non-free repository (don't worry about the naming, just install it)

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

Installing Nvidia drivers

Finally we are ready to install the Nvidia drivers

sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia

Once it is installed, reboot your computer. You should be able to find the Nvida control panel in your app launcher

That means it's been install successfully. Happy gaming