What Drivers to Install

#### Gaming Linux® From Scratch - Version 13.0

### Chapter 11. Graphics Drivers - Preliminaries

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# What Drivers to Install

On Linux, there are multiple drivers that one can install. Choosing the one you need can be difficult if you do not know what drivers are for what vendor and the perks and downsides of each option. This section explains all of that to better help you decide what you want or need.

### Note

Gallium3D is a technology that Mesa-25.3.5 relies on for OpenGL. In other words, Gallium3D drivers are just OpenGL drivers. Each Gallium3D driver is meant for different systems except `zink` which just feeds OpenGL instructions to the main Vulkan driver you install for your system.

## AMD

There are two AMD GPU drivers: AMDGPU (Radeon Southern Islands and later) and ATI (r300 and r600).

AMDGPU (Mesa-25.3.5): This driver is for AMD GPUs that are Southern Island Cards or later. It is open source and is the most standard AMD GPU driver. This driver is in the Linux kernel. There is one Gallium3D driver, `radeonsi`, and one Vulkan driver, `amd`.

ATI (Mesa-25.3.5): This driver is for the ATI AMD GPUs which precede GCN GPUs. It is open source and targets older GPUs. The driver is in the Linux kernel. There are two Gallium3D drivers: `r300` and `r600`. For Vulkan, there is one driver, `amd`.

Summary: If you have a modern AMD GPU, use AMDGPU. If you have an older card, go with ATI.

## Intel

Intel provides open source drivers, but for sake of simplicity, all the relevant open source drivers will be classified as one - i915. There is another driver called uvesafb.

i915 (Mesa-25.3.5): This driver, or rather collection of drivers, is for most Intel integrated and discrete GPUs. It is a single option in the Linux kernel but has various Gallium3D and Vulkan drivers. There is a good list on the Mesa-25.3.5 page under “Command Explanations” that will explain what Gallium3D and Vulkan driver you will need.

uvesafb (not in this book): This driver is for the Intel GMA 3600 series, a family of integrated video adapters based on the PowerVR SGX 545 graphics core. This driver was in the kernel since 3.5 but no longer since 4.15. This driver is not included in the book because of its lack of use by most people, but has a good Arch Linux wiki page at https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Intel_GMA_3600.

## NVIDIA

The situation revolving around NVIDIA is more unfortunate than the two vendors listed above and more complicated. NVIDIA does not support open source drivers besides their own open source kernel modules. Therefore performance with the open source driver, Nouveau, is slightly worse than NVIDIA's proprietary driver. Installing the proprietary driver can also be easier.

Nouveau (Mesa-25.3.5): This driver is open source but has generally worse performance than NVIDIA. The driver is in the Linux kernel. It has one Gallium3D driver, `nouveau`, and one Vulkan driver, `nouveau` [3]. The Gallium3D driver is known for its lackluster performance. The Vulkan driver is much more performant. For this reason, if you want to use Nouveau, it is highly recommended to install the Vulkan driver as well the `zink` Gallium3D driver so that OpenGL instructions can be fed into the Vulkan driver.

NVIDIA (NVIDIA-590.48.01 or NVIDIA-580.126.09): This is the proprietary driver and the performance of this driver is better than the open source alternative. It allows the use of NVIDIA's CUDA project which is useful for hardware acceleration, improving performance of games and workstation applications. This driver has a lot of issues to this day but still provides better performance, thus its installation is provided in this book. Firmware isn't needed as it is provided by this driver.

Summary: If you want good performance and care about workstation use cases, install NVIDIA. If you don't want to use the proprietary NVIDIA driver, use Nouveau. Installing `zink` is a good idea, too. As long as you install libglvnd-1.7.0, you will be able to install all these drivers side by side so you can switch between them if you want to, although not required.

[3] The `nouveau` Vulkan driver is also known as NVK, although the argument for NVK in `-D vulkan-drivers=` is just `nouveau` and does not have an alias.

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