NVidia GTX 1650 in Dell XPS in 2025

General system Kernel, boot, graphics & hardware
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I note there are already older (around 2022) posts regarding my hardware and Endeavour LInux. But a lot has happened since then and I’d appreciate some aid in sorting this out.

First, what is Endeavour’s latest iteration doing with my Dell’s NVidia GTX 1650? I’m well aware that NVidia traditionally has been a thorn in open source programmers’ sides, as they don’t share code well (at all?).

Second, more specifically, does Endeavour OS default graphics in lower demand situations to avoid the NVidia, somewhat like happens on MacBook Pros under Mac OS? The idea being the NVidia isn’t needed until something high-demand graphically comes up…

Third, is there any tweaking of Arch under the hood I should / could be doing to optimize my setup in order mainly to preserve battery? I’d note this rig has a 4k oled screen, so I’m not expecting miracles, just perhaps a bit more battery if possible. Perhaps (taking me back to my first question) Endeavour OS is already adjusted to handle these things?

Thanks. As always, appreciate this community very much.

2

If you mean the latest ISO, it is about the same for Nvidia GPUs as before.

But the updated application nvidia-inst should provide the driver recommended by Nvidia for your GPU. Please use command

nvidia-inst --test

to see if it recommends changing from Nvidia’s closed source driver to Nvidia’s open source driver. If in doubt, please share the output here.

Not sure what you could do for preserving battery, but the Arch wiki is a great source of information for that too.

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Thanks for the clue. Turns out nvidia-inst wasn’t installed on my machine, so I did install it using yay. Then ran your command suggested.

Output result:
2025-04-10 09:26:09: Note: 01:00.0 3D controller [0302]: NVIDIA Corporation TU117M [GeForce GTX 1650 Mobile / Max-Q] [10de:1f91] (rev a1)
2025-04-10 09:26:09: Info: Running: nvidia-inst v25.4.4-1
2025-04-10 09:26:09: Info: Command line: nvidia-inst --test
2025-04-10 09:26:09: Info: Selected mode: nvidia (open source)
NVIDIA card id: 1f91
Fetching driver data from nvidia.com …
2025-04-10 09:26:12: Info: Installing packages: dkms nvidia-open-dkms nvidia-utils nvidia-settings nvidia-hook

COMMANDS TO RUN:
    pacman -Syuq --noconfirm --noprogressbar --needed dkms nvidia-open-dkms nvidia-utils nvidia-settings nvidia-hook
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And I’m unsure what the above result actually suggests for me to do, if anything.

5

The last two lines show what command to run.

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6

It is telling you what it would do. If you just want to install the drivers, you can just run it normally.

However, if you installed from the ISO, you probably already have the drivers installed.

What does pacman -Q | grep -i nvidia show?

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Those lines show what commands the tool would run.

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Ah. A subtle but important difference. Thank you for the clarification.

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And if I run those commands, it appears it will install the open source drivers. Am I correct in that assumption? (If they aren’t already installed, that is)?

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Hmm. This:

nvidia-inst 25.4.4-1

Which seems rather uninformative?

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That means you don’t have the drivers installed.

nvidia-open are the latest drivers provided by nvidia. They have open sourced those drivers. nvidia are the closed source drivers but at this point it is recommended to use the nvidia-open drivers if your GPU supports it, which yours does. The latest GPUs are only supported on nvidia-open

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Thank you. Just ran the install and all appeared to go well. About to reboot. It’s all gonna explode and I’ll see Windows 3.11 on my screen. AAAARGGH!

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Okay, the first thing I noticed is that reloading Endeavour seemed, if possible, even faster than before (it has always been great on this machine). The second thing was that some initial error messages that used to appear (too fast for me to read them) didn’t appear this last time out. I’ll mark this solved in just a bit after some more tinkering first just to make sure. Hehe.

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@manuel @dalto @MyNameIsRichard Thanks so much for your input. This appears solved to me thanks to your input.

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Let’s look at this output in more detail:

2025-04-10 09:26:09: Note: 01:00.0 3D controller [0302]: NVIDIA Corporation TU117M [GeForce GTX 1650 Mobile / Max-Q] [10de:1f91] (rev a1)

This line tells the card is a Turing family GPU (TU117M), so the open source driver is needed.

2025-04-10 09:26:09: Info: Selected mode: nvidia (open source)

This line tells nvidia-inst selected the open source Nvidia driver.

NVIDIA card id: 1f91

This is the id of your card. It can be used for telling if the latest driver version provided by Arch supports the card. In some corner cases this can be useful info.

COMMANDS TO RUN:
pacman -Syuq --noconfirm --noprogressbar --needed dkms nvidia-open-dkms nvidia-utils nvidia-settings nvidia-hook

In this case this command is the only one to be executed. If you would have had any other related driver installed, then there would have been a command to remove them first.

So, as already mentioned here, the only thing to do was the suggested command.
And one can do so simply by running

nvidia-inst

Note that for gaming you’d want to add option --32 to nvidia-inst.

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