I own a laptop with a Nvidia graphics card. I did install the Nvidia driver of Debian 12 bookworm on it. The first try failed, because the kernel headers were not installed. I did install them and it worked. They are needed for the DKMS module. I also installed the CUDA drivers to make it possible to use the GPU for general calculations.

After this I wanted to run a test render in Blender. I couldn’t switch to a CUDA device in the Blender settings. But CUDA was installed already and the Nvidia driver was running! After a longer search on the web I found the curious solution:

Run Blender as root and then you can switch the CUDA device to your graphics card! OK just do:

$ sudo blender

In your shell. Now open the “Edit”->”Preferences” menu and set the “Cycles Render Devices” setting “CUDA” to your graphics card. Then exit Blender. Now run Blender as a normal user. Now you should see your graphics card as a CUDA device in the settings!

Have fun!