Nvidia Proprietary vs Open drivers - differences?

Question

I work primarily on a laptop with Nvidia 4070 card (Ada Lovelace codename), and not so long ago, I noticed out of nowhere appeared some Open drivers as an alternative to Proprietary, and what's more, to my surprise they are recommended by my Linux Mint 22.1 Cinnamon. I would like not to waste time and ask a relatively quick question:

What are those Open drives and do they offer something else than Proprietary ones? Thank you!

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Just a quick look:

$ apt-cache policy nvidia-driver-570{,-open}

nvidia-driver-570:
  Installed: 570.169-0ubuntu0.24.04.1
  Candidate: 570.169-0ubuntu0.24.04.1
  Version table:
 *** 570.169-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 500
        500 https://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-updates/restricted amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     570.133.07-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 500
        500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-security/restricted amd64 Packages
nvidia-driver-570-open:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 570.169-0ubuntu0.24.04.1
  Version table:
     570.169-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 500
        500 https://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-updates/restricted amd64 Packages
     570.133.07-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 500
        500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-security/restricted amd64 Packages

Answer 1

They’re the “open kernel” NVIDIA drivers, that is to say kernel modules with full MIT/GPLv2 source code. Most of the functionality is now handled in user space or in the GPU firmware, both of which remain proprietary. There shouldn’t be any functional difference.

Whether to use the proprietary or “open” drivers depends on which GPU you have. Turing and newer GPUs (which include your laptop’s GPU) should use the “open” drivers; older GPUs have to use the proprietary drivers. See the list of supported hardware on the “open” drivers and the section on kernel modules in the NVIDIA installation documentation for details.