Dual‑GPU setup (RTX 5060 Ti + GTX 1050 Ti) not working on Linux with NVIDIA 580

Graphics / Linux Linux
1

Hello,
I recently bought an RTX 5060 Ti and I’m very happy with it. However, I’m an inexperienced Linux user and I have an issue on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

I would like to keep my old GTX 1050 Ti installed in the second PCIe slot. After installing the NVIDIA 580 driver with open kernel modules, the 1050 Ti becomes completely invisible in Linux. Blender does not show it in the CUDA devices list either.

I still have a dual-boot with Windows 10, and under the same 580 driver both GPUs are visible and working at the same time.

But on Linux nvidia-smi shows only only that:
nvidia-smi --query-gpu=index,name,pci.bus_id --format=csv
index, name, pci.bus_id
0, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti, 00000000:02:00.0

And I have

lspci | grep -i nvidia
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation Device 2d04 (rev a1)
02:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation Device 22eb (rev a1)
04:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GP107 [GeForce GTX 1050 Ti] (rev a1)
04:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation GP107GL High Definition Audio Controller (rev a1)

My questions:

  • Which driver version should I install on Linux to use both GPUs together?
  • Is it possible to use the 1050 Ti for desktop rendering and the 5060 Ti for CUDA/OpenGL?

Additional info:

  • If I connect my monitor to the GTX 1050 Ti HDMI port, I get no display output at all on Linux.
  • My motherboard is an ASRock FM2 with DDR3 (I plan to upgrade to a newer platform, but at the moment I don’t have enough budget for that).

Thank you in advance for any help.

2

The short answer is there is no such driver.

The 1050 is required to use the closed,(proprietary) driver and the 5060 is required to use the open module driver. You cannot run both at once.

This split occured with the introduction of Blackwell and means cards Pascal or older can no longer be used in combination with Blackwell, (or newer presumably).

3

But… Windows 580 driver working correctly. Why can’t I install standard (without open kernel) 580 driver on Linux for 5060Ti ? What is difference, why this driver not working?

On Windows both cards are available in Blender CUDA devices.

4

I’m not expert but if this driver is open sourced could it be possible theoretically to compile it for older GPU’s which are supported by standard driver.

And the second problem is that I sometimes use Blender 2.79 where CUDA acceleration not work under 5060Ti, and currently also 1050Ti card disappear

5

Linux forces you to use GSP which Pascal GPUs do not have. There is no Linux driver where you can run both.

6

The details are here.

“The proprietary flavor supports the GPU architectures Maxwell, Pascal, Volta, Turing, and later GPUs until Blackwell. Blackwell and later are only supported by the open kernel modules.”

Also, the above link states, “The two flavors are mutually exclusive: they cannot be used within the kernel at the same time, and they should not be installed on the filesystem at the same time.”

If you currently have both on your system, this may be why you’re seeing unstable behaviour.

Unless Blender 2.79 has been recompiled with recent versions of Cuda, it’s very probable that your 5060 will not hardware render, as looking here, the 2.7 series ran from 2014 to 2018.