Linux Mint 20.1 NVIDIA graphics card driver setup

Via Notes on resizing partitions to install Linux Mint 20.1

After installing Mint, if you have an unsupported graphics card (e.g. NVIDIA) you will see a “Check your video drivers” popup in the corner of the screen (clicking which will run com.linuxmint.mintdrivers)

Your system is currently running without video hardware acceleration.

You may experience poor performance and high CPU usage

If you want to exit, you can access it again from the menu by searching “driver manager”

There are two options:

• nvidia-driver-460 (recommended)
• xserver-xorg-video-nouveau (open-source)

The latter will be selected but you should select the first (“Nvidia driver metapackage”)

The end result should be the following:

lspci -k | grep -EA3 'NVIDIA'

⇣

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation Device 2204 (rev a1)
	Subsystem: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd Device 403b
	Kernel driver in use: nvidia
	Kernel modules: nvidiafb, nouveau, nvidia_drm, nvidia
01:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation Device 1aef (rev a1)
	Subsystem: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd Device 403b
	Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
	Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel

nvidia-smi

⇣

Sun Jan 31 19:58:26 2021       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 460.32.03    Driver Version: 460.32.03    CUDA Version: 11.2     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
...