Stuck at 640x480 - Run Nouveau and nVidia graphic drivers side-by-side?

Question

I have recently installed a nVidia Tesla K80 graphics accelerator into an existing dual-socket workstation running Ubuntu 20.04 with a low-energy consumption nVidia Quadro NVS315. After updating the nVidia drivers (from legacy 390 that were needed for the Quadro to 450 in order to support CUDA on the K80), the now unsupported Quadro is stuck at a resolution of 640x480, leaving me unable to use xrandr to introduce additional custom resolutions. I have already asked the friendly folks at nVidia and they have confirmed that it is indeed a driver issue (as the Quadro is a legacy GPU by now) and that it is not possible to use two different nVidia drivers in parallel.

I have also tried to use Nouveau but I was unable to turn it on only for the Quadro in "Software & Updates/Additional Drivers", all the entries apart from "Continue using a manually installed driver" are greyed out for the Quadro if the nVidia-proprietary 450 driver is activated for the Tesla. If I switch both devices to Nouveau I have the full resolution but I can't run code on the Tesla.

Furthermore I have tried to change the Grub framebuffer resolution as proposed in this solution but then every graphic interface loads very slowly like a scan-line that takes almost a second per refresh.

As it is close to impossible to code on 640x480, I would like to ask if there is a way to force the Quadro running on the manually installed drivers to use a higher resolution or if I can force Ubuntu to use Nouveau only for the Quadro, while using the 450 drivers for the Tesla. Any hints are appreciated.

Thanks for taking your time. :)

@Nmath Hey nmath, sadly it is a dual Xeon machine without onboard graphics. Yeah, I have only noticed now that Nouveau mentions on their official page that it isn't compatible with official Nvidia graphic drivers either, so I can't run it parallel to the Tesla nVidia driver as well... The tesla is a computing card, so has no graphic output. I heard there exist ways to output over the mainboard (so potentially also over the NVS 315) but I think this will reduce the computational power of the Tesla. — 2b-t, Jul 18 '20 at 20:20
I ended cranking up the Grub2 frame buffer resolution to the highest acceptable rate where it would not start lagging 1024x768, so I can use the nVidia driver while working with CUDA. For normal desktop use I will turn on the Nouveau driver in "Software & Updates/Additional Drivers" and can get the full resolution on the NVS 315 but without being able to use CUDA. In any case thanks for your feedback and have a nice weekend. :) — 2b-t, Jul 18 '20 at 20:28

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 01 '20 at 17:51

I came across two possible solutions that both worked for me

Increase the GRUB frame buffer resolution: For me the resolution in this case was limited to 1024×768 - with higher resolutions it would start lagging.
Buy a newer generation low-power graphics card (I ended up with a Nvidia Quadro P620 to accompany my Nvidia Tesla K80) that is compatible with the same version of the regular Nvidia graphics driver (e.g. 450.51.05 Data center driver -> supported products -> Nvidia Tesla K80 and 450.51 Display driver -> supported products -> Nvidia Quadro P620)

Stuck at 640x480 - Run Nouveau and nVidia graphic drivers side-by-side?

1 Answers1