NVIDIA drivers for the MX110 on Arch Linux

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First, you need to identify the exact GPU model, which in this case is an NVIDIA MX110. To do that, you can use the lspci command in the terminal:

lspci | grep -i nvidia

# 01:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GM108M [GeForce MX110] (rev a2)

The part right after “NVIDIA Corporation” indicates the GPU architecture, which in this case is “GM108M”, as well as the specific model “GeForce MX110”. By following the official wiki, you just need to pick the drivers that are compatible with this architecture. In our case, they are provided by the AUR package nvidia-580xx-dkms. To install this package, you can use an AUR helper like yay:

yay -S nvidia-580xx-dkms

If you previously installed other NVIDIA drivers, you might get incompatibility warnings. In that case, remove the old drivers before installing the new ones:

sudo pacman -Rns nvidia nvidia-utils nvidia-settings nvidia-dkms

Besides the drivers, it is important to ensure you have the packages needed to build kernel modules, such as linux-headers (and possibly also dkms):

sudo pacman -S --needed linux-headers

After installing everything, it is recommended to reboot to make sure the changes take effect:

reboot

To verify that the drivers were installed correctly, you can use nvidia-smi:

nvidia-smi

# +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
# | NVIDIA-SMI 580.126.09             Driver Version: 580.126.09     CUDA Version: 13.0     |
# +-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
# | GPU  Name                 Persistence-M | Bus-Id          Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
# | Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |           Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
# |                                         |                        |               MIG M. |
# |=========================================+========================+======================|
# |   0  NVIDIA GeForce MX110           Off |   00000000:01:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
# | N/A   71C    P8            N/A  /  200W |       4MiB /   2048MiB |      0%      Default |
# |                                         |                        |                  N/A |
# +-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
#
# +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
# | Processes:                                                                              |
# |  GPU   GI   CI              PID   Type   Process name                        GPU Memory |
# |        ID   ID                                                               Usage      |
# |=========================================================================================|
# |    0   N/A  N/A            1879      G   /usr/bin/gnome-shell                      0MiB |
# +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Launching a Steam game with NVIDIA drivers

Even if the installation succeeded, Steam games may still prefer the integrated GPU over the discrete one. To force the use of the NVIDIA GPU, it should be enough to add the following environment variables to the game’s launch options:

__NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia %command%

After launching the game, you can verify that the NVIDIA GPU is actually being used with nvidia-smi. The processes running on the discrete GPU should be listed under the “Processes” section of the output.