How to Install NVIDIA & Intel Graphics Drivers in Arch Linux (2025 Updated Guide)
On an Arch machine with an NVIDIA card, installing the desktop is act one and the driver is the final boss. Get it wrong and you meet a black screen; skip it and everything renders on the CPU in slow motion. Get it right and it is ten minutes, set and forgotten. This is the NVIDIA path — and Intel integrated users, your entire story is sudo pacman -S mesa intel-media-driver. You may go read something else.
Know exactly which chip you have
lspci | grep -E "VGA|3D"
What that prints decides everything. Turing and newer — RTX 20-series upward — can run the open kernel modules. Maxwell and Pascal — GTX 900 and 1000 — run the classic proprietary driver. Anything older lives in the AUR on life support, the 470xx and 390xx branches, and honestly belongs in a cupboard.
The right package for your kernel
On the stock linux kernel, the plain proprietary stack:
sudo pacman -S nvidia nvidia-utils lib32-nvidia-utils
Running linux-lts or linux-zen instead? You want DKMS, which rebuilds the module for whichever kernels you keep:
sudo pacman -S nvidia-dkms nvidia-utils linux-headers
The nvidia-open variant is the same userspace on open kernel modules — the recommended direction on Turing and newer. One rule above all: never mix driver families in the same install.
Early KMS, or why you black-screened
The classic NVIDIA failure: the module loads too late for the boot splash or the Wayland session, and you stare at nothing. The fix is early KMS — building the module into your initramfs. In /etc/mkinitcpio.conf:
MODULES=(nvidia nvidia_modeset nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm)
Rebuild with sudo mkinitcpio -P, and add nvidia_drm.modeset=1 to your kernel command line. The wiki also documents a pacman hook that rebuilds the initramfs whenever the driver updates; set it once and forget it exists.
Hybrid laptops: PRIME
If lspci showed both an Intel iGPU and an NVIDIA chip, the battery-friendly default is running the desktop on Intel and waking the big GPU only when needed:
sudo pacman -S nvidia-prime
prime-run glxinfo | grep "OpenGL renderer"
Prefix games and renders with prime-run; on Plasma 6 you can right-click any launcher and pick the discrete card without typing a thing. Then verify the whole stack: nvidia-smi for temperatures, driver version and utilization in one screen, and glxinfo naming your card as renderer means you have won.
Hardware rendering smoothly is a small daily luxury. In Gaza, videographers edit and upload through power cuts on patched-together machines so the world keeps seeing their streets as they are. Keeping the record running is heavier work than any of ours.
A tour is only as good as its driver, and on the Karakoram Highway that is not a metaphor. Our Hunza and Skardu trips run with men who have taken those switchbacks for decades, in rain, snow and festival traffic. That is the reliability we sell at HTG Travels — the boring, essential kind.
