tl;dr if you’re running the G05 version of NVidia driver and your video card is relatively new, you can easily upgrade to the G06 version of the driver by first uninstalling the G05 and then installing the G06.
Situation
You are running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, have an NVidia card that’s not too old (check legacy list) and you are running G05 of the NVidia driver, having previously installed it from the NVidia repository, for example by following these or similar instructions. You know you have the G05 driver version because when you run the following
> rpm -qa | grep nvidia-gl
nvidia-glG05-32bit-470.129-6.1.x86_64
nvidia-glG05-470.129-6.1.x86_64
You get the version containing the G05.
According to the NVidia Unix Drivers download page, that’s the legacy 470.xx version. The current production driver version is 515, which when you click on it, takes you to the download page for the G06 version.
Requirements
First, go to the download page, click on the “supported products” tab, and verify your video card model is listed there. I can check my video card model by running
> lspci | grep VGA
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GP107 [GeForce GTX 1050 Ti] (rev a1)
So looks like I have a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, which is new enough to be supported by G06 driver.
If your video card isn’t listed under the supported products, then it’s likely the G06 driver will not work and you shouldn’t continue. But if it’s there, great! Continue.
Uninstall G05 Driver
First, to ensure you don’t lose your ability to execute commands during this process, switch to text terminal. However, before you do this, you’ll probably want to save the rest of the commands somewhere, perhaps an easily accessible text file. To switch to the terminal in text mode, I typically press
Now, let’s uninstall the G05 driver
> sudo zypper rm nvidia-glG05 x11-video-nvidiaG05 nvidia-computeG05 nvidia-gfxG05-kmp-default
Once that’s done, the old driver is gone.
Install G06 Driver
Now let’s install the new driver by running
> sudo zypper in x11-video-nvidiaG06
This should install all the required dependencies. Also, it might take awhile because it will be compiling some code. After that’s done, you’ll need to reboot. Still from the same terminal run
> sudo reboot
And once that’s done, you should be running the new G06 version of the NVidia driver. Run the same command again
> rpm -qa | grep nvidia-gl
nvidia-glG06-32bit-515.57-17.1.x86_64
nvidia-glG06-515.57-17.1.x86_64
And now you should see the new version is installed.