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.
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/
I don’t know why you wouldn’t be able to install the driver with the graphics card inserted.
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.