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I am experiencing some trouble with my graphical card (Sometimes my GPU crashes and I have to reboot my PC). I suspect it might have something to do with a faulty driver that is chrashing. While looking into my drivers in Ubuntu, I noticed a lot are available:

enter image description here

What are the differences between all these drivers, which one should I pick and why?

I am asking this because my GPU keeps crashing (Also on windows), therefore I might need another driver than the default one. Trying to automate this process with sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall throws the following error:

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-435 : Depends: libnvidia-gl-435 (= 435.21-0ubuntu0.18.04.2) but it is not going to be installed
                     Depends: nvidia-dkms-435 (= 435.21-0ubuntu0.18.04.2) but it is not going to be installed
                     Depends: xserver-xorg-video-nvidia-435 (= 435.21-0ubuntu0.18.04.2) but it is not going to be installed
                     Depends: libnvidia-cfg1-435 (= 435.21-0ubuntu0.18.04.2) but it is not going to be installed
                     Depends: libnvidia-ifr1-435 (= 435.21-0ubuntu0.18.04.2) but it is not going to be installed
                     Depends: libnvidia-fbc1-435 (= 435.21-0ubuntu0.18.04.2) but it is not going to be installed
                     Recommends: libnvidia-decode-435:i386 (= 435.21-0ubuntu0.18.04.2)
                     Recommends: libnvidia-encode-435:i386 (= 435.21-0ubuntu0.18.04.2)
                     Recommends: libnvidia-ifr1-435:i386 (= 435.21-0ubuntu0.18.04.2)
                     Recommends: libnvidia-fbc1-435:i386 (= 435.21-0ubuntu0.18.04.2)
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
Psychotechnopath
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  • Does this answer your question? How to download all required Ubuntu drivers – karel Jan 22 '20 at 11:11
  • @karel More or less but not entirely. Your advice would be to set it up automatically, so ubuntu takes care of drivers/driver compatabilities?? I am still wondering what the differences are between the drivers. What about the open source one? And what is a "binary" driver? – Psychotechnopath Jan 22 '20 at 11:18
  • The difference in the drivers correspond to differences in the graphic cards and graphic processors. Instead of forcing users to guess which driver to install each time they install a graphics driver, the ubuntu-drivers program makes this decision for you automatically. Otherwise you would be relying on bad advice from blog posts and YouTube videos created by people who think they are smarter than the ubuntu-drivers wizard. – karel Jan 22 '20 at 11:25
  • @karel Ok, thx for the info. I am asking this question because my graphics card keeps crashing. Also, when trying the autoinstall command it gives me an error ( I edited that into my question) – Psychotechnopath Jan 22 '20 at 11:40
  • Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages (https://askubuntu.com/a/1081938) – karel Jan 22 '20 at 11:53
  • @karel Tried that, Synaptic says that there are no broken packages. Strange. Maybe it's time to upgrade my GPU anyways, since it's from 2013 and I also have to use legacy versions of software to get it to work with CUDNN these days =) – Psychotechnopath Jan 22 '20 at 12:05

1 Answers1

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I am asking this because my GPU keeps crashing (Also on windows)

This indicates that the problem is unlikely to be software after all. Why do you conclude that it is the "GPU" that crashes? Did you look into kernel logs or the X server logs?

I would suspect it could be a hardware problem, including a faulty graphics card, motherboard, power supply, or memory errors. Replace the graphics card, and then run whatever system tests the BIOS gives you (or boot into the memtest option, if you have that).

And fix the broken packages, either cycle apt update and upgrade, or apt remove all the problematic packages and then reinstall the correct driver package.

Ketil Malde
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  • I figured it was a software problem rather than a hardware problem, because taking a look at the event log in windows and googling the error I got there indicated it was some driver related issue. Also, my GPU does not crash that often (Like once per week). And it displays graphics perfectly if it did not crash. Therefore I concluded it must be some software problem. – Psychotechnopath Jan 22 '20 at 13:21
  • If you have error messages, you should include them in your question. It's impossible to help you if you won't say what the problem is. And at least with Linux, there is all kinds of noise in the logs, most of it is just normal operations. And faulty hardware will often cause kernel errors, so just because the system reports it, doesn't mean it causes it. – Ketil Malde Jan 22 '20 at 17:39
  • To be honest, I'm not to experienced with the logs. There is a lot of noise in windows and in linux as well, So i'm not 100% sure which log contains the error I am talking about. Do you have any tips on where i should start looking? – Psychotechnopath Jan 23 '20 at 09:52