DaVinci Resolve 18 on Fedora 37 (NVIDIA GPU)

linux Jan 1, 2023

DaVinci Resolve is a powerful video editing and color grading software that is used by professionals in the film and television industry. It is available for various operating systems, including Linux. In this tutorial, I will show you how to install the NVIDIA drivers and the required tools on Fedora 37 Linux in order to use DaVinci Resolve 18. These steps are important because the NVIDIA drivers requires special packages to provide improved performance and support for hardware-accelerated video decoding and encoding, which is essential for smooth video playback and rendering in DaVinci Resolve.

Follow the steps in this tutorial carefully and you should have DaVinci Resolve up and running on your Fedora Linux system in no time.


1. Switch to Xorg

You will need to switch to Xorg server. Unfortunately, I couldn't manage a way to make it work with Wayland. If you know how to do that, leave a comment below.

Log-out your current session, then switch to Xorg:

2. Install NVIDIA drivers

Installing NVIDIA drivers is much easier nowadays. This should be simple.

Make sure you have third-party packages enabled:
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/workstation-working-group/third-party-repos/

Then, install the `akmod-nvidia` package:

sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia

Great. Now, make sure you restart your machine.

3. Install Xorg libs for NVIDIA drivers

Install the `xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda` package:

sudo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda

This solves a known error saying that you don't have support for the `opencl` lib.

4. Install DaVinci Resolve 18

Because of licensing reasons, I will not paste any link here, but you can download the DaVinci Resolve package for free from the official website:

DaVinci Resolve 18 | Blackmagic Design
Professional video editing, color correction, visual effects and audio post production all in a single application. Free and paid versions for Mac, Windows and Linux.

Just go there, download the `.zip` file, uncompress it and run the installer.

That's it

You should have everything ready now!

If you want to double-check, follow the steps:

  1. Open the DaVinci Resolve app
  2. Open/Create any project
  3. Open setting (`Ctrl+,`)
  4. Go to `Memory and GPU` tab and check if your NVIDIA GPU is available there.

You should see something like this:

References

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Luiz Felipe F M Costa

I am a quality engineer at Red Hat / Ansible. I love automation tools, games, and coffee. I am also an active contributor to open-source projects on GitHub.