How to make Nvidia CUDA work? (for GPU rendering in Blender)
To install CUDA from the standard repositories do a:
sudo apt-get install nvidia-cuda-toolkit nvidia-modprobe
This will currently install V6.5 of CUDA. At the time of this writing V7.0 is the latest and can be had straight from the nVidia repositories. Read this warning before you head to the nVidia repositories.
I was able to find a solution on Nvidia's website. They have a .deb package that you have to download and install on your system to enable the repository to install CUDA from Nvidia directly. Here's how I got it working:
- Go to https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads
- Choose the .deb file that corresponds to your Ubuntu version. (At the time, they didn't have a package for Ubuntu 15.04, so I chose the one for 14.10 instead. This did solve my problem, but I'm not sure if it will create any compatibility issues down the road. Doesn't seem like a terrible risk, but I wanted to make that known.)
- Go to your file browser, located the downloaded .deb package, and double-click (or single-click) to install the package via Ubuntu Software Center.
- Open a terminal
- Type: sudo apt-get update
- Type: sudo apt-get install cuda
- Wait for the packages to download and install, then restart your computer (the packages were over 900MB for me, so it took around 20 minutes to download with my connection)
After the reboot, Blender was able to use CUDA to initiate GPU rendering and baking. Problem solved!