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I'm really trying to avoid reinstalling because I've installed a lot of software and customized a lot. I'm running Gnome 17.04.

My graphics card is a hybrid GTX 960M. lspci shows these lines;

00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Skylake PCIe Controller (x16) (rev 07)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation HD Graphics 530 (rev 06)
01:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GM107M [GeForce GTX 960M] (rev a2)

So both are being detected.

I never touched any graphics drivers until last week. I just used whatever was installed by default. I made the now apparent mistake of switching to proprietary drivers in the "Additional Drivers" section of "Software & Updates".

At first it was ok. nvidia-375 was installed. When opening the NVidia X Server Settings application, the Intel PRIME profile was selected. I switched it to NVidia and rebooted and graphics performance became horrible, especially for games. Major screen tearing and tons of heat from the graphics card.

If I switch back to Intel, I'm unable to login. I get the login screen, but when I enter my password, I just get a flash, and then I'm back at the login screen. Nothing I can find in logs to help. I can switch to another non-graphical console and do sudo prime-select nvidia and then I can log in again. But I don't want to use this anymore because the performance is horrible, and the laptop gets WAY too hot. Even scrolling webpages is choppy, and YouTube videos look much worse, choppy and tons of tearing.

Back in the Additional Drivers, I can switch back to the XOrg Nouveau driver, but then for some reason, when I start Steam, everything locks up. I'm unable to use Chrome, and even if I kill Steam, my network connection seems blocked.

At this point, I think I'd like to go back to however it was when I first installed, but I can't seem to get it back. Just using the Intel graphics was fine because I don't play heavy 3D games, mostly side-scrollers.

This is my first laptop with NVidia, I've always stuck with AMD. So I'm a little lost on how to get this going.

The laptop is an MSI Leopard Pro.

Delorean
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  • See if this answer is useful: https://askubuntu.com/questions/41681/blank-screen-after-installing-nvidia-restricted-driver#163808. Note: you will need to press ++ to get a terminal window in the login screen. – Enterprise Jun 25 '17 at 04:22
  • @PJSingh I've done this already. That's actually the point I'm at now, but the performance is way worse than before. – Delorean Jun 25 '17 at 05:55

1 Answers1

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First and foremost, you'll need to apply the following workarounds to correct any bootup issues you may experience with switching to the Intel Integrated Graphics via prime-select tool:

  1. Make sure that you're running the latest BIOS and the EC ROM firmware. You have not provided the full model string of your machine, and thus cannot point you to the download page for that without that information. To extract that info, run:

    sudo dmidecode -t chassis

  2. Add the following options to the kernel options passed by grub on boot (by editing /etc/default/grub ):

    acpi_osi=! acpi_osi="Windows 2009"

  3. For the Intel Skylake integrated graphics controller, you may have to apply additional workarounds to get the HuC and the GuC firmware components to load, needed for VAAPI H/W acceleration, power savings,etc. This gist outlines the entire process.

Remember that after any changes made to the grub configuration file, the boot configuration must be updated by running:

sudo update-grub

  1. Finally, on the issue of drivers: It's strongly recommended to use Ubuntu's Proprietary Driver Repository, as shown:

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-381 --install-recommends -y

Note that we've selected the R381 release as its' the latest for now. This might change in the future.

The final addition to this is Oibaf's PPA , which is optional if you need the latest and greatest X and mesa driver stack:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Then reboot to test changes.

The reason I recommend Oibaf's PPA is if you intend to use the Intel Integrated Graphics (Skylake) for other things such as VAAPI hardware accelerated encoding, albeit at the cost of some stability issues you may encounter since this puts your graphics stack in a bleeding edge state. If you don't require such functionality and are not willing to put your stack in a bleeding edge state, you may safely omit that step.

Dennis Mungai
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  • Thank you but this just gets me on to the latest nvidia drivers. I was on the nvidia-381 drivers and they were horrible (I tried several versions). What I'm trying to do now is go back to whatever it was when I FIRST installed Gnome, because it worked so much better then. – Delorean Jun 25 '17 at 19:40