NVIDIA on Fedora

Date: 2025-08-22

If you installed Fedora on a system with an NVIDIA GPU, you will have reduced graphics performance out of the box: the reasons for that are fairly simple. Fedora Linux ships a FOSS driver for NVIDIA GPUs called nouveau, developed through some clever reverse engineering work beginning in 2005: this was necessary due to NVIDIA's decision not to fully open-source their GPU drivers.

Why Nouveau Doesn't Always Cut It

Nouveau is operating at a disadvantage due to limited access to hardware internals, which results in noticeably worse performance and lack of certain features that the user may require (e.g. CUDA). For example, Batman: Arkham Knight only gave me 25% of the framerate I achieved on the proprietary driver running on a GTX 1650: this is insufficient for users that wish to maximize performance for their hardware.

Installing NVIDIA's Proprietary Drivers On Fedora

It is advised to follow RPM Fusion's guide to install the proprietary drivers.

On the Fedora Sway spin, which drops GNOME in favor of Sway window manager there's one more step. The Sway development team has made it very clear that they will not debug issues relating to proprietary GPU drivers, and by default, Sway refuses to launch with them. To bypass this, you must run Sway with the --unsupported-gpu option set. I opted to alias sway like so in my POSIX-like shell configuration :

alias sway='sway --unsupported-gpu'