Nvidia-396 in Bionic

[vinnywright]

Well if you use the graphics drivers ppa in bionic and were previously using a driver lower than 396 it turns out that you can no longer use just an "sudo apt install nvidia-396" to get this new driver .

first the meta package has been renamed to "nvidia-driver-396" and second it no longer prompts apt or apt-get or anything to first remove the old stuff and then install the new .
you must do it manually , first removing/purging all your current nvidia-* stuff and then install the new .

I could not figure out why I could not install it , so expressed my concerns at the graphics drivers PPA and Michael Marley (from the graphics drivers PPA) emailed me back to discuss the problem and finally we hit on the fact of what was going on IE me trying to do it the old way .

this is how I did it and it was quite painless with just a reboot and I am now on the 396 driver

 sudo apt-get --purge remove nvidia* && sudo apt-get install nvidia-driver-396

just in case you were experiencing the same frustration

VINNY

[claydoh]

*cough* driver manager *cough*

I wonder who or what changed, as the PPA drivers are 6 weeks old,
.
.
.
.
Wait a minute, I seem to recall me posting here in a few places that when moving between the proprietary driver versions, running apt autoremove to remove a couple of stray packages.
You should not have to purge/etc. At least I never did.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Also, I don't have to mess with this messy mess anymore.
Life is so much better not having to install driver, or tweak xorg............

[vinnywright]

@claydoh ,, yes I know the "driver manager" may have been helpful , but it had not been working for some time and got removed by the upgrade from xenial to Bionic (I just reinstalled it and will test it's ability to install 396 driver after first removing pugeing the 396 and installing the 390)
apt-get was refusing to install the 396 driver ,,,,,

vinny@vinny-Bonobo-Extreme:~$ sudo apt-get install nvidia-driver-396
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
nvidia-driver-396 : Depends: nvidia-dkms-396 (= 396.54-0ubuntu0~gpu18.04.1) but it is not going to be installed
                    Depends: nvidia-utils-396 (= 396.54-0ubuntu0~gpu18.04.1) but it is not going to be installed
                    Depends: xserver-xorg-video-nvidia-396 (= 396.54-0ubuntu0~gpu18.04.1) but it is not going to be installed
                    Depends: libnvidia-cfg1-396 (= 396.54-0ubuntu0~gpu18.04.1) but it is not going to be installed
                    Recommends: libnvidia-encode-396:i386 (= 396.54-0ubuntu0~gpu18.04.1)
                    Recommends: libnvidia-ifr1-396:i386 (= 396.54-0ubuntu0~gpu18.04.1)
                    Recommends: libnvidia-fbc1-396:i386 (= 396.54-0ubuntu0~gpu18.04.1)
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

when I contacted the graphics drivers PPA I was told , and I quote .

Do you still have 390 installed? If you do, you must remove all traces of it before installing 396. (We don't have transitional packages in this case as to not force users to upgrade.)

and running the apt-get sequence I posted got it sorted for me , and hence why I posted it .

I will post back what happens with the driver manager test some time this weekend ,,or maybe later tonight .

VINNY

[GreyGeek]

VINNY, can you see any difference in behavior of 396 over 390? Everything is working great for me with 390 and if it isn't broken I don't want to fix it.

[vinnywright]

VINNY, can you see any difference in behavior of 396 over 390? Everything is working great for me with 390 and if it isn't broken I don't want to fix it.

I do not do any gaming or hard graphics work so I don't usually do FPS logging , and have no serous way of measuring such , that said if you have a good way to test such a thing I am going to revert to the 390 driver for a test of the "driver manager" let me know soon (tonight)what to do to test performance for you and I will check now , with the 396 and after with the 390 and report hear for you what I find .

[GreyGeek]

Is the "driver-manager" the /usr/bin/ubuntu-drivers app?

You probably don't have Minecraft, but Stellarium would be a good test. So would glxgears:

$ glxgears
Running synchronized to the vertical refresh. The framerate should be
approximately the same as the monitor refresh rate.
52055 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10410.095 FPS
53760 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10751.841 FPS
53717 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10743.299 FPS
53410 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10681.895 FPS
53316 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10663.185 FPS
53780 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10755.828 FPS
53496 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10699.112 FPS
52733 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10546.427 FPS
53753 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10750.551 FPS

[vinnywright]

so your monitor refresh rate is 10750 FPS ? the output should reflect your monitors refresh rate .

I have Stellarium so will test with both .

with glxgears now with 396 I get

vinny@vinny-Bonobo-Extreme:~$ glxgears
Running synchronized to the vertical refresh. The framerate should be
approximately the same as the monitor refresh rate.
303 frames in 5.0 seconds = 60.438 FPS
301 frames in 5.0 seconds = 60.018 FPS
301 frames in 5.0 seconds = 60.012 FPS
301 frames in 5.0 seconds = 60.008 FPS
301 frames in 5.0 seconds = 60.016 FPS
^C

Stellarium idles at 18 FPS and will go to 60 FPS wile panning zooming the screen with the 396

will get back when I revert to 390

as far as driver manager no I was talking about the system settings module or package "kubuntu-driver-manager"

VINNY

[GreyGeek]

mmm... Stellarium gives me 80-95 fps.

When I run glxgears at full screen it gives me:

$ glxgears
Running synchronized to the vertical refresh. The framerate should be
approximately the same as the monitor refresh rate.
43366 frames in 5.0 seconds = 8672.199 FPS
9354 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1870.753 FPS
9334 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1866.669 FPS
9345 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1868.984 FPS

Your's looks like it is not running on your Nvidia chip.

Ya, I expected to see VSync as well, but it displayed frames per 5 seconds. Again:
I use Accurate scaling, OpenGL3.1 Rendering, and automatic tearing prevention.

I'm using what ever the Nvidia driver set up as default in the Nvidia config app GUI.

[vinnywright]

exact same FPS in glxgears and Stellarium with the 390 driver .

am about to start the test of the system settings driver manager and see if will in fact take me back to the 396 diver or not .

VINNY

[vinnywright]

mmm... Stellarium gives me 80-95 fps.

When I run glxgears at full screen it gives me:

Your's looks like it is not running on your Nvidia chip.

O no it's running on the Nvidia and running at the screen refresh rate , as it should!

VINNY

[GreyGeek]

Kubuntu driver manager

Ah, I thought it was the ubuntu-drivers app, but it is:

kcmshell5 kubuntu_driver_manager

It's still selecting for me the same driver ubuntu-drivers selected

[vinnywright]

Ah, I thought it was the ubuntu-drivers app, but it is:

kcmshell5 kubuntu_driver_manager

It's still selecting for me the same driver ubuntu-drivers selected

[ATTACH=CONFIG]7780[/ATTACH]

the nvidia-driver-396 comes from the "graphics drivers PPA" you do not have it enabled ,do you now ?

VINNY

[vinnywright]

@claydoh
my test of the system settings driver manager is complete , it did not work !!

although it gave me the choice for the 396 driver and had it marked as "recommended" and selecting it and clicking "apply" it showed a progress bar and when done gave the "collecting information about the system" dialog it never showed anything new .

when rebooting I was left with a 640x480 display and a mix of 390 and a few(the ones that could be installed )396 packages , in other words a broken display driver .

so I reran the apt-get sequence in my OP and all is good , I'm back on the 396 driver and a full 1920x1080 display.

So this leaves me to conclude that the info I received from the graphics drivers teem was correct and one must remove-purge the current nvidia driver before trying to install the 396 ,,,,,,,,

VINNY

[GreyGeek]

Na, VINNY, I do not have the graphics driver PPA enabled and as long as 390 works for me as well as it has I'm going to stay with it. It is very nice to know the information you found out from the PPA guys, though, in case I or others do need to upgrade to 396 (most likely if a kernel upgrade pushes us to it).

[claydoh]

@claydoh
my test of the system settings driver manager is complete , it did not work !!

although it gave me the choice for the 396 driver and had it marked as "recommended" and selecting it and clicking "apply" it showed a progress bar and when done gave the "collecting information about the system" dialog it never showed anything new .

when rebooting I was left with a 640x480 display and a mix of 390 and a few(the ones that could be installed )396 packages , in other words a broken display driver .

so I reran the apt-get sequence in my OP and all is good , I'm back on the 396 driver and a full 1920x1080 display.

So this leaves me to conclude that the info I received from the graphics drivers teem was correct and one must remove-purge the current nvidia driver before trying to install the 396 ,,,,,,,,

VINNY

Yes, that is what happened to me when I would switch nvidia driver versions, apt autoremove *always* worked for me here. Up to two weeks ago, that is

I had the gtx 1050 from December until two weeks ago. The 2G of vram were not cutting it for me.

390 is perfectly great for most, but is some cases (like Rise of the Tomb Raider via Steam, which requires it), the performance improvement is noticeable , mainly with games needing an up-to-date Vulkan.

Me checking it out and comparing driver performance is why I know all the runarounds that can happen when moving between different proprietary driver versions. Some earlier iterations of the 396 driver weren't as nice for non-Vulkan games, but that improved in newer releases of that driver version.

AMD= no driver to install at all, no tearing at all, no tweaking necessary to fix said tweaking, at all. The oibaf PPA with updated mesa drivers, etc is useful, but not necessary for most.

I did try the non-free amdgpu (which is based on the free driver code), and it cut my game performance in half.


Also, Vinny, I assume that since you don't have the driver manager automatically, you must be running Neon?
I haven't bothered moving my PC over from Kubuntu. Lazy, and everything just works still. IE steam runs great, so I don't care about the rest, moistly