I am changing my GPU from an Nvidia Quadro K4000 to an AMD Radeon Pro WX 7100. The K4000 works well for my purposes, but requires the nvidia-470 driver which is no longer supported by Ubuntu, so I have to use the proprietary Nvidia driver, and the regular Ubuntu updates occasionally knock out some of the Nvidia libs (particularly libnvidia-compute-470 if one doesn’t watch the Software Updater closely). Unfortunately, when using nouveau with the K4000, there are frequent desktop freezes (which I have documented in another thread).
In searching the internet, some posts say that one can simply power down, swap the hardware, and Ubuntu will load amdgpu upon reboot instead of the Nvidia drivers. However, other posts suggest that one must purge the Nvidia drivers before shutting down and rebooting, because the Nvidia drivers may create some custom config files that will force Ubuntu to look for an Nvidia GPU, thus blocking the kernel from loading amdgpu and preventing the system from booting properly. Conflicting info…
Do the Nvidia drivers need to be purged before rebooting with the AMD GPU? Is there proper procedure for changing from Nvidia to AMD GPU?
I can relate my experience going from Nvidia to AMD GPU. In my case from 24.04 I did the hardware swap booted up - no issue in the least on old hardware.
*-display
description: VGA compatible controller
product: Richland [Radeon HD 8670D]
vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
If you made no changes to your system, you should only need to power down, swap video cards, then power up again after and have the linux kernel automatically use different kernel modules (aka drivers) matching the changed hardware.
Where it differs it gets more complicated usually, is due to changes made post-install, for example any commands you copy/pasted from internet web pages that altered ‘default’ behavior & maybe blacklisted certain modules (thus forcing a specific behavior), as its those changes that should be reversed. But those will be machine specific, and performed by someone on your machine with sudo rights (ie. someone authorized). We’re not going to know what changes were made, unless we’re told what was done.
I can’t speak to specifics of your video cards though sorry.
The 470 driver is the proprietary driver, so exactly what driver are you using?
Note that Ubuntu said they are going to support the 470 driver for Ubuntu 24.04 (after they incorrectly “transitioned” it to 535), although months later, they have yet to fix it.
I did make a PPA with the last working version of 470 - nvidia470repack : Daniel Letzeisen
which downloads the file NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-470.256.02.run that installs the driver.
I haven’t really followed what Ubuntu said about supporting 470 in 24.04 LTS, but I do know that once the 470 driver is installed, if you don’t carefully watch the software updates window, libnvidia-compute-470 will get updated to later versions, which breaks at least nvidia-smi with a Driver/library version mismatch error.
Per my installation notes, the only manual things I did outside of executing the above-mentioned run file was
Make sure you run the uninstaller: sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-470.256.02.run --uninstall
The blacklist file can be removed, though it shouldn’t affect the Radeon. Make sure you remove the nvidia-gtk-workaround.conf file.
but I do know that once the 470 driver is installed, if you don’t carefully watch the software updates window, libnvidia-compute-470 will get updated to later versions
Yes, because Ubuntu missed up the 470 package(s). I could give you instructions to fix that, but if you’re switching GPU’s, I won’t bother.
I know. That’s why I gave the user instructions on how to switch and didn’t elaborate too much on using 470. I mentioned it to clear up user’s misconceptions (and for the benefit of anyone else reading).
But thanks for thanking me.
I had some extra time to experiment, so I just went ahead and swapped in the AMD card to see what would happen. Everything appears to be working fine so far. After a few days, if there are no problems with the AMD card (it is used), I will purge the nvidia drivers to clean them off the system.
