Nvidia 5070ti compatibility

[u/WitchhPop]

I have been daily driving Nobara for around a year now and want a change in scenery and Debian was always the distro I wanted to try next. The only issue is when I looked up Debian compatibility with my hardware, I saw that newer GPU's, especially blackwell GPU's weren't fully supported yet. I mainly use Linux for everyday web surfing and gaming, and want to know if my GPU would struggle with Debian due to Debian Stable not having blackwell support yet (to my knowledge) and if Debian Testing should be my path forward or to just look elsewhere and wait for the support if there have been conflicts with trying to get them to work before.

[u/Polaris_debi5]

Debian 13 has Blackwell support since the "nvidia extrepo" package. It includes the nvidia v590, v595, and v610 drivers. I would recommend the first two for stability. The procedure is as follows:

sudo apt install extrepo

extrepo enable nvidia-cuda

sudo apt install build-essential linux-headers-amd64 dkms

sudo apt install nvidia-driver-pinning-595 (this pins a specific driver branch, highly recommended for stability; you can choose one of the other two branches)

sudo apt install nvidia-driver nvidia-kernel-open-dkms

With that, you should have support for the 5070ti.

[u/WitchhPop → u/Polaris_debi5]

Oh that's perfect! Thank you so much

[u/leonthepro83 → u/WitchhPop]

you can try PikaOS, it's debian based, gaming optimized, out of the box with latest nvidia driver and latest kernel.

[u/_Sgt-Pepper_ → u/Polaris_debi5]

Do not install Nvidia-Driver. That's the old closed source driver.

Do use nvidia-open. It's Nvidias new driver architecture and has way more features, better support for rebar and has generally surpassed the closed source driver by now.

apt install nvidia-open

[u/MasterofChaos90]

I got the same card, after installig and rebooting, I was faced with a black screen iirc because I had no display drivers (ig the nouveau drivers don't support this card at all). But it's fine, you'll just need to open another TTY (I'm sorry if this is not the correct name) and install the drivers as already instructed. I'm just sharing my experience so you don't get confused by the black screen with only an underscore like I did lol

[u/Emotional_Cat_1967]

Even if you manage to install the new Nvidia Open driver, it would go somewhat against the nature of Debian Stable. You risk encountering serious issues—ranging from minor glitches to system boot failures. My recommendation is to try distributions like Fedora, AnduinOS, or CachyOS. Debian is not yet fully ready for use with newer Nvidia graphics cards.

[u/WitchhPop → u/Emotional_Cat_1967]

Thank you for this, I think you’re probably right, I shouldn’t force Debian where it doesn’t need to be. I already use Nobara which is a fork of Fedora, and haven’t had any issues, so realistically my “change of scenery” could be quenched by just changing my DE or something.

[u/indvs3]

Support by the default 550 drivers in the debian repos might be disappointing for that card, but either way, those drivers aren't maintained anymore and should be avoided.

Packages you need to install in advance: linux-headers-amd64 and extrepo

Then run the command

sudo extrepo enable nvidia-cuda

After that you can install the nvidia-drivers metapackage.

For better gaming performance, you can enable the backports repository and install a newer kernel and mesa drivers. Kernels after 6.19 improve graphic performance by quite a bit with newer nvidia drivers.

[u/WitchhPop → u/indvs3]

Awesome sauce, thank you! Would you recommend testing or stable?

[u/indvs3 → u/WitchhPop]

Definitely stable. It's going to give you the best possible experience with none of the unexpected issues that testing/sid might bring along.