If you’re using the Ubuntu graphics-drivers PPA to get the latest and greatest nVidia proprietary drivers, be advised that there might be a problem with their release of the 455.45 driver, for 20.04 (Focal), at least.
I downloaded that driver today on my G3, and the next time I rebooted, the nVidia card was not working. The G3 uses nVidia Prime, so it booted into the desktop on the Intel integrated GPU, but when I tried to start a game that uses the nVidia card, it crashed. I tried to start glmark2 (a small graphics benchmark that is nice enough to tell me what renderer it is using) on the nVidia, and it gave an error message.
I checked all of the usual stuff, and it all seemed in order. I then removed the nVidia driver (I used the command line, but if you remove the ‘nvidia-driver-455’ package in Synaptic, it will have the same effect) and downloaded the one directly from nVidia, which comes in a cross-platform .run installer format that isn’t as easy to use as the .deb format that’s used by the PPA, and it worked perfectly well.
The driver, in other words, is fine; it’s apparently something with the way the Ubuntu devs (the graphics-drivers PPA is maintained by Ubuntu itself) packaged it. Just a heads-up… it may or may not work for you. If not, you can roll back to the previous version (455.38) or install the .run from nVidia as I did. Note that if you do use the .run, it will not show the driver in Synaptic, so if you want to uninstall it, you would use the .run file for that again, but with the –uninstall switch. It’s generally easier to use the .deb packaged versions, but you have the option in case that isn’t working (or if the newest one isn’t available in .deb yet and you simply do not wish to wait).
Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)
