Nvidia GPUs have been running fine on Arm for a while now—I just upgraded the System76 Thelio Astra to an RTX 4080 Super and am testing it now.

But Nvidia seems to have a partnership with Ampere, which probably leads to their drivers getting priority support, and likely a few special edge cases in code to work around a couple PCIe quirks on the Altra CPUs. Nvidia also builds their own Arm CPUs—a lot of them—so Arm support is definitely a priority for them.

Unfortunately, that support doesn't extend to the Raspberry Pi. And a company that's in many ways the polar opposite , Intel, also has GPU drivers that don't work on the Pi. At least, not until very recently.

Intel i915 and Xe driver updates for Pi 5

The Intel A-series cards use Linux's i915 driver, and B-series uses the newer Xe driver. Both drivers have a couple quirks that prevent them from loading on the Pi, but we've worked around those in this patch against the 6.12 LTS kernel .

For the A750, using that patch and a newer compiled version of Mesa than what ships with the Pi, you can get a full desktop environment and... some 3D acceleration. But it's quite glitchy, probably due to some memory corruption:

For the B580, I haven't gotten to a desktop environment yet, but I at least got a blinking cursor! That's something, right?

All the progress and testing is being documented in the following GitHub issues:

• Intel Arc A750
• Intel Arc B580

And since I know someone will ask: Resizable BAR support should work on the Pi 5, but right now the Intel drivers don't seem to work with it. We're actively debugging that problem in this issue: Resizable BAR support on Pi 5 .

Nvidia driver updates for Pi 5

For Nvidia, every card I test still runs into the same set of errors:

[    6.079514] NVRM: nvAssertOkFailedNoLog: Assertion failed: Failure: Generic Error [NV_ERR_GENERIC] (0x0000FFFF) returned from status @ kernel_gsp_tu102.c:482
[    6.079619] NVRM: RmInitAdapter: Cannot initialize GSP firmware RM
[    6.080914] NVRM: GPU 0000:01:00.0: RmInitAdapter failed! (0x62:0xffff:1863)
[    6.081257] NVRM: GPU 0000:01:00.0: rm_init_adapter failed, device minor number 0

I started a discussion in the Nvidia Open GPU Kernel Modules repo: Raspberry Pi support (arm64)? .

To my surprise, Andy Ritger responded Nvidia now has an internal bug report (#5053788) .

So... we'll see. I'm hopeful this is a simple bug that just needs a few tweaks to work on the Pi.

Conclusion

I posted a short video with some demos of the Intel cards on my 2nd YouTube channel, and you can watch it below:

Make sure to follow the various issues on the Raspberry Pi PCI Express database to see progress on different graphics cards.