EDIT:
The issue is now solved!!! I can now render with the GPU, there are no lags in the view-port, everything is smooth and now I can say the switch from Windows to Linux is a success - at least from the point of view of a Blender Artist :).
Now… where did things go wrong? I guess there were multiple wrong decisions taken by me.
I’m still a novice when it comes to Linux, but for the fellow artists trying to make a similar switch I think you might find the following useful:
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Make sure the “Compute capacity” of your GPU card is at least 2.0 …I had an old card - the GeForce series but it was luckily above 2.0 . You can check yours here.
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One thing I forgot to mention in the original post was the edition. It was Linux Mint 18.2 Cinnamon. Which is supposedly, as I found out from other people online, not really fit for Blender GPU rendering (and Blender in general). I might be wrong but after I switched to Xfce things worked and are now apparently faster.
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32-bit just doesn’t work. So I switched to a 64-bit Mint installation and that may be one of the reasons things started working (as jensverwiebe and YAFU mentioned, thnx :)). I have a legit explanation as far as my knowledge goes - the CUDA Toolkit is no more available for Linux 32-bit installations. Since nVidia users CUDA extensively, things should not work naturally.
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Finally, make sure you are using the recommended drivers for your card, because by default Linux selects the open source drivers (which I don’t have much knowledge about) which may result in some bugs. You can change this in the Driver Manager.
A little side note:
And a little tip for Mint Xfce users, who are having trouble using the <Alt> key for Blender functions, go to Settings>Window Manager Tweaks in Linux and in the Accessibility tab you can simply change the "Key used to grab and move windows: " to anything other than <Alt>… for example: <Super>. This is the simplest solution and works for Xfce users but I’m not sure about other editions. I had a hard time getting this to work, so I hope it helps some of the users out there [ especially those who have broken the middle-mouse-button like me :)].
Thanks to all those who contributed in this discussion. Without your suggestions, I would have got frustrated and switched back to Windows agian. Thanks once again!
------------- THE INITIAL ISSUE ------------
Hello,
I have been using Blender for a long time now. But I recently moved to Linux Mint 18.2 from Windows 7. I have a pretty old graphics card: GeForce GT 610
I installed the latest drivers compatible with my card using a *.run file. It seemed to have installed fine.
I enabled GPU in blender 2.79 RC 2 and I could see my card in the list. Everything was fine till this point.
But when I try to render using GPU, the render gets cancelled and I get this error: CUDA error at cuModuleLoad: Invalid kernel image
I know some other people also had this issue but I couldn’t find any good solutions for me so far.
Please let me know if you know any way to get this thing to work. I really want to get back to creating artworks with Blender.
OS: Linux Mint 18.2
Blender:2.79 RC 2
Card: GeForce GT 610
Error: CUDA error at cuModuleLoad: Invalid kernel image
Thanks in advance,
-Sayan