Hello! I have a laptop with an Nvidia GPU and an integrated Intel card. I’ve been trying to get the GPU to run in order to play games, using Nvidia Optimus with the proprietary drivers.
In trying this, I ran sudo nvidia-xconfig, which changed my xorg.conf to add Nvidia as a device. I didn’t immediately see a difference in my glxinfo, so I rebooted, only to find after the grub I get a blank screen with an underline cursor in the top left and no keyboard input. How do I access my PC to revert the change? I recall there was some way via pressing “e” on the grub menu, but I cant find what to change there. I’d rather not have to set up a usb to live boot and arch-chroot, since I don’t have one available at the moment. Also, what went wrong with running nvidia-xconfig, and how can I get my GPU to work?
Thanks.
When you get to that screen press ctrl+alt+f3, you will switch to tty3 where you can login in. Then you can try the following.
If I remember correct when you run nvidia-xconfig it creates a backup for the original file in the same directory. Just copy the backup over the xorg.conf file and then reboot and see if it’s working again. If that doesn’t work rename xorg.conf to something else so that you don’t have an xorg.conf file, then next time you reboot it should load some sane defaults after which you can setup your xorg.conf file again with sudo nvidia-settings.
Thank you that’s got me back in. I tried running it again but changing the driver from “nvidia” to “nvidia-lts” since I realised I’m using arch linux-lts and have that corresponding nvidia driver. I got the same sort of boot issue but this time it stalled with something like “Reached target: graphical user interface” in the boot process, rather than just a blank screen. I don’t know if that helps troubleshoot. Looking at my nvidia-settings I see “GPU Utilization: 0%” and can’t see any options to configure its use. Where can I do that?
Did you change the driver name in xorg.conf from nvidia to nvidia-lts? If so that’s not going to work because the driver name is nvidia either way doesn’t matter which kernel you install. The only thing is that the package nvidia matches with the linux package and the nvidia-lts matches with the linux-lts packages. The other option would be to remove the nvidia package and install nvidia-dkms, in that case it doesn’t matter which kernel you use.
Are you able to get to a tty as before here, if not you will have to chroot into your system to undo your change.
Yeah I’ve got back in. Right thanks that makes sense.
I’ve been trying PRIME render offload and I’ve managed to get the GPU utilizaton up from 0% by running the game via prime-run rather than trying to get the whole system running on the GPU. It seems to be working as expected but hasn’t helped the framerate as I’d thought it would.
Thanks for the help though ^^
I have no experience with Prime setups so I can’t help you with that, but I would look getting it setup.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PRIME
I don’t know what Nvidia gpu your system has, so it may depend on the gpu what frame-rates you will get.
Have you tried envycontrol ?
I also have a dual intel/Nvidia laptop and using envycontrol to set mode to ‘hybrid’ has been very quick and painless without having to worry about manually adding any additional arguments to anything any time I run something that relies on the GPU 
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