Graphics Cards

Drivers for hardware accelerated desktop rendering, improving performance and fidelity.

The Linux graphics stack consists of several components, but the main component is the mesa package.

Intel

pacman -S mesa vulkan-intel intel-media-driver libva-intel-driver

AMDGPU

pacman -S mesa libva-mesa-driver vulkan-radeon

Nvidia

Nouveau open source driver

pacman -S mesa libva-mesa-driver
yay -S nouveau-fw

Proprietary driver

pacman -S nvidia nvidia-utils

Early KMS

In order to enable early KMS with the prorprietary driver, you will need to take additional steps.

The kernel modules of the proprietary kernel module need to be included explicitly in the MODULES array of your /ets/mkinitcpio.conf file (or a drop-in config file under /etc/mkinitcpio.conf.d/):

MODULES=(nvidia nvidia_modeset nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm)

Additionally, remove the kms hook from the HOOKS array. This is to prevent the unintentional loading of the nouveau kernel module.

Enable Kernel Mode Setting

By default, the nvidia_drm kernel module does not enable Kernel Mode Setting (KMS). In order for Wayland compositors to function properly, KMS must be explicitly enabled via a kernel command line argument at boot:

nvidia_drm.modeset=1

NOTE: Refer to Boot Loader for how to add the parameter to your boot configuration.

To verify that kernel mode setting is enabled:

cat /sys/module/nvidia_drm/parameters/modeset

Y means Kernel Mode Setting was enabled on boot.
N means Kernel Mode Setting was not enabled on boot.