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Psychotechnopath
Asked: 2020-01-23 02:57:48 +0800 CST

What driver should I pick for my GPU, and what are the differences?

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I am experiencing some trouble with my graphical card (Sometimes my GPU crashes and I have to reboot my PC). I suspect it might have something to do with a faulty driver that is chrashing. While looking into my drivers in Ubuntu, I noticed a lot are available:

enter image description here

What are the differences between all these drivers, which one should I pick and why?

I am asking this because my GPU keeps crashing (Also on windows), therefore I might need another driver than the default one. Trying to automate this process with sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall throws the following error:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 nvidia-driver-435 : Depends: libnvidia-gl-435 (= 435.21-0ubuntu0.18.04.2) but it is not going to be installed
                     Depends: nvidia-dkms-435 (= 435.21-0ubuntu0.18.04.2) but it is not going to be installed
                     Depends: xserver-xorg-video-nvidia-435 (= 435.21-0ubuntu0.18.04.2) but it is not going to be installed
                     Depends: libnvidia-cfg1-435 (= 435.21-0ubuntu0.18.04.2) but it is not going to be installed
                     Depends: libnvidia-ifr1-435 (= 435.21-0ubuntu0.18.04.2) but it is not going to be installed
                     Depends: libnvidia-fbc1-435 (= 435.21-0ubuntu0.18.04.2) but it is not going to be installed
                     Recommends: libnvidia-decode-435:i386 (= 435.21-0ubuntu0.18.04.2)
                     Recommends: libnvidia-encode-435:i386 (= 435.21-0ubuntu0.18.04.2)
                     Recommends: libnvidia-ifr1-435:i386 (= 435.21-0ubuntu0.18.04.2)
                     Recommends: libnvidia-fbc1-435:i386 (= 435.21-0ubuntu0.18.04.2)
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
drivers nvidia graphics

1 Answers

  1. I am asking this because my GPU keeps crashing (Also on windows)

    This indicates that the problem is unlikely to be software after all. Why do you conclude that it is the "GPU" that crashes? Did you look into kernel logs or the X server logs?

    I would suspect it could be a hardware problem, including a faulty graphics card, motherboard, power supply, or memory errors. Replace the graphics card, and then run whatever system tests the BIOS gives you (or boot into the memtest option, if you have that).

    And fix the broken packages, either cycle apt update and upgrade, or apt remove all the problematic packages and then reinstall the correct driver package.

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