The NVIDIA X driver does not preserve values set with nvidia-settings
between runs of the X server (or even between logging in and logging
out of X, with xdm(1), gdm, or kdm ). This is intentional, because
different users may have different preferences, thus these settings are
stored on a per-user basis in a configuration file stored in the user's
home directory.
The configuration file is named ~/.nvidia-settings-rc. You can specify
a different configuration file name with the --config command line
option.
After you have run nvidia-settings once and have generated a
configuration file, you can then run:
nvidia-settings --load-config-only