Fix Blank Screen Nvidia Optimus Laptop Linux and Cuda

Checklist

I assumed that you got your laptop running and the only thing left is installing Nvidia video driver to perform more advance tasks such as playing video games and parallel processing. Simply, the checklist is knowing your video graphic card and which driver version suits it. For example, my laptop graphic card is Nvidia 720M which has a compute capability of 2.x Fermi. Therefore, the highest Nvidia driver version that supports is 390s and finally the highest cuda version is 8.0 where higher versions are not supported.

Find your card’s compute capability at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA or check using their website https://www.nvidia.com/download/index.aspx?lang=en-us.

Go to https://docs.nvidia.com/deploy/cuda-compatibility/index.html and check which cuda version supports base on Nvidia driver version.

Go to https://docs.nvidia.com/deploy/cuda-compatibility/index.html and check which cuda version supports base on compute capability. If it is 2.x Fermi or lower, you have to try Cuda 8 and lower if it still does not work.

Restore Default