I spent about 2 days and all night with Google AI trying to get this highly recommended NVIDIA RTX 5050 card installed so I could use it with Blender and it finally gave up on me.
I have a Gateway PC. I know Blender isn’t gaming but these Nvidia cards are definitely used in gaming. I wondered if anyone else has installed one. I’ve got Kali Linux.
It said that the card is “So new that the manufacturer hasn’t come up with a working driver yet” and to check back in a few weeks maybe. Surely it can’t be serious? How can NVIDIA sell graphics cards without a working driver. I spent over $200 on this card :(. Thank god I managed to get my system working again, it almost broke my Blender installation but found a workaround to get it back, but its as slow as ever. I’m stuck with this card and it refuses to run.
The Catch-22 is that it apparently will only run on the latest graphics driver that “just came out this week” but you can’t install it with the graphics card inserted, and you can’t install it with it not inserted.
It freezes forever at loading Ramdisk. All the earlier drivers won’t run it either. Of course I have a older system, not incredibly old but dated. I wanted to upgrade my graphics card instead of buying a whole new PC. Thats where spending $200 sounded smart to avoid spending a lot more on a new PC right. Its hugely disappointing. Thanks for any help or experiences.
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I spent about 2 days and all night with Google AI
Are you sure you’ve eaten your daily recommended allowance of small rocks? If you can’t get the driver to work, try putting glue on the GPU to make sure the heatsink doesn’t slide off.
How can NVIDIA sell graphics cards without a working driver.
I don’t use Kali Linux, but it sounds like it’s based on Debian’s testing release. Debian hasn’t packaged Blackwell drivers yet, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Kali doesn’t have them packaged either. You can download Blackwell drivers from Nvidia, but the Debian guys won’t have made sure that things don’t break with them.
https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/details/259042/
Supported Products
GeForce RTX 50 Series
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 D v2, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 D, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5050
But you can’t install it with the graphics card inserted, and you can’t install it with it not inserted.
I don’t know why you wouldn’t be able to install the driver with the graphics card inserted.
It freezes forever at loading Ramdisk.
The initrd contains drivers that aren’t directly built into the kernel.
Typically, the way this works on Debian with third-party drivers is that you have the proper linux-headers package matching your current kernel installed. Then a third-party package registers a DKMS module with the driver source, and when you install a new kernel, the driver gets recompiled for that kernel. That driver gets dropped into the initrd, the ramdisk with the out-of-kernel stuff required to boot.
I don’t use Nvidia hardware, so I can’t tell you if that’s what’s supposed to happen, but I would guess so.
If you’re not booting with it, my guess is that something isn’t working as part of that process. Either the Nvidia script didn’t register the module or it didn’t get rebuilt or the installed driver has some issue and isn’t working when you try to load it.
You can probably run
sudo dkms statusand it’ll show DKMS modules and their current status. That might be a starting point.What happens when you plug the card in, and plug your monitor into the card. Does the computer boot?
I’m stuck with this card and it refuses to run.
What part refuses to run, specifically? You don’t get a video signal? Blender doesn’t see it?
It said that the card is “So new that the manufacturer hasn’t come up with a working driver yet” and to check back in a few weeks maybe. Surely it can’t be serious? How can NVIDIA sell graphics cards without a working driver.
Please stop listening to AIs. This is a flatly false statement.
OH I get it as far as AI. Its can be very helpful, but its a double edged sword for sure lol. And it can be wrong. So basically here is the problem I’m having as far as I can see. I have the Kali Linux OS and the only driver that will work for this card is apparently the most recent one, I believe the 590. NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-590.48.01.run For some reason, this latest driver is impossible to download and install with the OS from a Linux command line the usual way at least with the Kali system.
My PC is a Gateway DX4870. Its not ancient but its not new. But then like I said, I would be a prime candidate for a video card upgrade right. If I had a new PC I probably wouldn’t need one.
In theory what I think you should be able to do is power down, put the new GEFORCE video card in, boot, and then it should boot into the desktop on your existing old video card since the new one doesn’t have a driver right. Then you would go into a hardware manager, install the driver for the new video card, remove the driver for the old video card, reboot again, and you’re on the NVIDIA. But this new card will not do that. If you boot with the card in, it takes over the system and the old video card does not function. So you just get a black screen, no cursor, nothing. Thats apparently because the card has seized the system, but has no driver to actually function.
But if you try to install the Nvidia driver first without the card, it won’t install it because the card is not there. So its a Catch-22.
Anyway I worked with this for days, finally ended up booting into a live instance of Linux off a USB, and downloading the NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-590.48.01.run driver and trying to install it that way.
I got almost to the finish line. At that point after installing it that way, if you plug the monitor into the HDMI port on the new GEFORCE card, you will get a Kali Linux boot screen, so that shows fine. But when you try to boot the OS, you only get as far as “Loading Ramdisk…” and hangs there permanently. You never get into the desktop.Unfortunately I found that in order to get Blender working again without the card, all of the Nvidia had to be removed, so I had to uninstall everything I had installed and I’m back to square one again. Its sure been difficult :/
I am pretty sure no distro uses/works with the the .run files, you should be installing the drivers through the respective package manager.
Also why Kali? it’s a very specialized distribution for cyber security. It’s not for usual desktop uses
.run files are definitely doable in Linux, don’t know why you’d think otherwise. It’s my preferred way to install the proprietary drivers on Debian
Why though when you can just
apt install ...and have it auto update etc.
Do the nvidias .run files basically do that too? Thought the official .runs are just binaries/libs getting dumped into correct places same as oldmake install
Just a hunch, but if you haven’t upgraded your PSU, it’s likely not able to power that card.
You say you’re getting a display at least, so that’s something. You should be able to boot your machine into safe mode and install the driver. You also don’t need to have the card inserted or enabled to install the driver, not sure where you read that.
One thing to help debug: boot a LiveUSB of something Fedora-based. See if you get to a desktop with the Nouveau driver at least.
I’m going to second trying a Fedora live USB and see if that just works. Kali is an incredibly specialized linux variant and trying to use it as a general desktop OS is likely the source of your headaches.
There is no reason you can’t do that, but it is far from the path of least resistance.
Gonna emphasize this as well.
Whatever you are trying to do, kali is not built for tasks that need a dedicated GPU. If you’re using AI, Ubuntu might be the best option, if it’s gaming then bazzite or cachy can be a solid choice - even steamos. But there are a multitude of reasons not to expose your GPU to Kali use cases.
I understand there is probably things you can not tell us about OP, but just be warned that you are introducing unnecessary points of failure to your opsec (ideally kali should be run in a VM, which I don’t think it is here) and vice-versa you are exposing your GPU to some unmitigated risk depending on your setup, making your GPU a potential casualty in the worst case. At that point the compatibility issues and extensive setup of your GPU in Kali might as well become side-issue.
I really hope you are absolutely sure about this.
Gateway PC
What CPU do you have?
└─$ lscpu
Architecture: x86_64 CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit Address sizes: 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual Byte Order: Little Endian CPU(s): 4 On-line CPU(s) list: 0-3 Vendor ID: GenuineIntel Model name: Intel® Core™ i3-3220 CPU @ 3.30GHz CPU family: 6 Model: 58 Thread(s) per core: 2 Core(s) per socket: 2 Socket(s): 1 Stepping: 9 CPU(s) scaling MHz: 100% CPU max MHz: 3300.0000 CPU min MHz: 1600.0000 BogoMIPS: 6585.19 Flags: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat ps e36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx rdtsc p lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl xtopology nons top_tsc cpuid aperfmperf pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt tsc_deadline_tim er xsave avx f16c lahf_lm cpuid_fault epb pti ssbd ibrs ibpb stibp t pr_shadow flexpriority ept vpid fsgsbase smep erms xsaveopt dtherm a rat pln pts vnmi md_clear flush_l1d Virtualization features:
Virtualization: VT-x Caches (sum of all):
L1d: 64 KiB (2 instances) L1i: 64 KiB (2 instances) L2: 512 KiB (2 instances) L3: 3 MiB (1 instance) NUMA:
NUMA node(s): 1 NUMA node0 CPU(s): 0-3 Vulnerabilities:
Gather data sampling: Not affected Itlb multihit: KVM: Mitigation: VMX disabled L1tf: Mitigation; PTE Inversion; VMX conditional cache flushes, SMT vulner able Mds: Mitigation; Clear CPU buffers; SMT vulnerable Meltdown: Mitigation; PTI Mmio stale data: Unknown: No mitigations Reg file data sampling: Not affected Retbleed: Not affected Spec rstack overflow: Not affected Spec store bypass: Mitigation; Speculative Store Bypass disabled via prctl Spectre v1: Mitigation; usercopy/swapgs barriers and __user pointer sanitization Spectre v2: Mitigation; Retpolines; IBPB conditional; IBRS_FW; STIBP conditional ; RSB filling; PBRSB-eIBRS Not affected; BHI Not affected Srbds: Not affected Tsx async abort: Not affectedThanks. Just wanted to make sure we weren’t talking Pentium or something here. ;p
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