The developers of the Arch Linux distribution announced the replacement of packages with proprietary NVIDIA drivers "nvidia", "nvidia-dkms", and "nvidia-lts" with the packages "nvidia-open", "nvidia-open-dkms", and "nvidia-lts-open", which utilize open kernel modules provided by NVIDIA. This decision is due to the fact that NVIDIA driver version 590.x only supports GPUs starting from the Turing microarchitecture (RTX 20xx and GTX 1650 series), making it pointless to maintain the proprietary version of the modules in the official repositories.
Open modules support operation only with GPUs equipped with a GSP (GPU System Processor) microcontroller, which offloads initialization and management operations from the driver to proprietary firmware. GSP is included in graphics cards based on microarchitectures such as Turing, Ampere, Ada, and Hopper.
Graphics cards based on Pascal and Maxwell microarchitectures, as well as older GPUs, are not supported by the open modules, so users with older GPUs are advised to remove the packages nvidia, nvidia-lts, or nvidia-dkms and switch to the legacy branch of the drivers offered in the AUR repository in the nvidia-580xx-dkms package. Users of Turing and newer GPUs will be automatically switched to the packages with open kernel modules (just install updates using the command "pacman -Syu").
Source: opennet.ru
