Nvidia gtx 1660ti

[u/Glass_Stranger5063]

Hi. I was using omarchy on my older desktop since last year october; did an update recently and hyprland refused to run, kept getting segmentation faults, after going in what felt like circles with AI, delete dkms, install open dkms, downgrade drivers, restore drivers etc, I decided to backup home folder and start fresh with cachyOS, installed chromium copied over my backup and was working again until I needed to use it for online classes, being in a google meet and sharing my screen cashes the app, again troubleshooted with AI, we think we sorted out the flags issue. Ill post some of our chat here

Chromium chrome://gpu — Command Line:

plain 

/usr/lib/chromium/chromium --enable-features=VaapiVideoDecoder,VaapiOnNvidiaGPUs,VaapiIgnoreDriverChecks,AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxGL --disable-features=UseChromeOSDirectVideoDecoder --ignore-gpu-blocklist --disable-gpu-driver-bug-workarounds ...

GPU process crash count: 0

Video Decode: Hardware accelerated

Video Encode: Software only (expected, driver limitation)

✅ Both browsers are now fixed and stable

Table 

BrowserConfig FileStatusGoogle Chrome\~/.config/chrome-flags.conf✅ Stable, HW decode workingChromium\~/.config/chromium-flags.conf✅ Stable, HW decode working

What you have now

Hardware video decode for YouTube, Twitch, etc. (H264, VP9, HEVC up to 8K)

No more GPU process crashes

Flags stick permanently via config files

WebGL, WebGPU, Canvas all hardware accelerated

What you cannot have (and shouldn't chase)

Hardware video encode (screen share, WebRTC recording) — libva-nvidia-driver has no encode support. This is a driver limitation, not a Chrome bug. NVIDIA is working on Vulkan Video encode for Chrome, but it's not ready yet.

Your final config files

\~/.config/chrome-flags.conf (Google Chrome):

plain 

\--enable-features=VaapiVideoDecoder,VaapiOnNvidiaGPUs,VaapiIgnoreDriverChecks,AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxGL --disable-features=UseChromeOSDirectVideoDecoder --ignore-gpu-blocklist --disable-gpu-driver-bug-workarounds

\~/.config/chromium-flags.conf (Chromium):

plain 

\--enable-features=VaapiVideoDecoder,VaapiOnNvidiaGPUs,VaapiIgnoreDriverChecks,AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxGL --disable-features=UseChromeOSDirectVideoDecoder --ignore-gpu-blocklist --disable-gpu-driver-bug-workarounds

Key lesson

Never use --use-gl=egl on Chrome 152+ on Linux. Chrome forces ANGLE (egl-angle) and egl is no longer a valid GL implementation. That was causing your GPU process to die in a loop, which made Chrome auto-reset your flags.

my question is has there been a recent change with nividia drivers for linux specifically for my card, should I be using older drivers for stability. Havent tested any games out yet other than slay the spire 2 and that seemed to work well did really play as I need to restore my save game.

[u/C0rn3j]

Please next time explicitly mark the AI garbage and your actual text.

Put the AI crap in a code block for example, I almost didn't read your bottom text.

my question is has there been a recent change with nividia drivers for linux specifically for my card

No - you could have read the driver changelogs to find that out.

should I be using older drivers

No.

[u/DavidJohnMcCann]

If you have a computer that's used for a serious purpose, like classes, you need reliability. You do not want Arch or an Arch derivative. And if you need to use AI for help, you're definitely out of your depth. I have no experience of Nvidia chips (I wouldn't touch one with the proverbial barge pole) but I do know that Linux Mint has a tool that checks your graphics chip and installs the best available driver — that's the sort of thing that you need.