I recently rebuilt my PC and reinstalled Arch Linux as part of the process. However, no matter what I do, I seem to be having problems with NVIDIA drivers. I installed the proprietary and open drivers, tested with both GNOME and KDE, and even used both X11 and Wayland. So far, X11 was unusable, while Wayland has been more usable with semi-frequent lag-spikes. Quick searches in forums and reddit shows that this isn’t a common issue. Other users have had success with NVIDIA on the latest drivers.
I’ve been using Linux since 2010 and an Arch derivative since 2013, and am a full-time software. I’ve never had this much trouble with NVIDIA, but here I am. I have no idea what’s going on or how to fix it. I’d appreciate any help anyone can give.
Specs:
Ryzen 9 5900X
ASRock X570 Creatore
64GB RAM (TeamGroup T-Force Vulcan Z 2x32GB 3200MHz CL16)
Samsung 980 Pro 1TB
Dell Alienware RTX 3090
Kernel: 6.8.1-arch1-1
Steps taken:
Switched between nvidia-open and nvidia
Tested with GDM/Gnome 46 and SDDM/Plasma
Enabled KMS early loading
Enabled drm modesetting
Enabled nvidia memory persistance
Forcibly enabled GDM wayland support
So far, only enabling wayland has shown any amount of success. Switch back to x11 still results in horrible performance. And even on wayland, Steam and Firefox have strange performance issues where they launch very stuttery, stabilize after awhile, then returns to poor performance. Certain tasks also cause system-wide slowdown, like installing a game on steam. Apparently, X11 works great with NVIDIA, but that has not been my experience with either KDE or GDM. Searches show year-old bugs in the driver related to mouse polling rates, but that doesn’t seam to be the issue for me.
GPU model is RTX 3090, other specs listed in original post.
By poor performance, I mean all of the above. Low FPS (easily less than 10), spikes in frametimes when starting new threads (like opening a browser or searching for an app in the application menu), mouse cursor animation stutters, etc.
I’ve also launched Shadow of the Tomb Raider to test performance. The game crashed on launch on Wayland, and crashed when running the in-game benchmark on X11. According to dmesg, this was caused by the GPU falling off the bus, which happened every time I ran the game.
Haha I can understand that. Someone local was selling this Dell GPU for $600, seemed like a good deal since these parts are selling for $800 online otherwise.
I disabled CSM and enabled 4G Decoding and Resizable BAR, and just now confirmed those settings are still set in UEFI. Everything is correct.
I took jode’s advice and installed Ubuntu 22.04 just now. Ubuntu uses nvidia-535 and gnome-42.9 versus nvidia-550 and gnome-45.5 on Arch. Tested with Shadow of the Tomb Raider again and it successfully ran. However, despite my monitor being 1080p60hz, Tomb Raider could only hit 27FPS on highest preset. The benchmark claims to be 99% GPU bound. nvidia-smi showed that during the benchmark, the GPU only ran at 50W, leaving 300W unused for whatever reason. Power-cycling the system did not change GPU behavior, nor did switching from the linux native port to the windows port of SotTR.
So technically, Ubuntu did improve results. Now I get to figure out why suddenly the nvidia driver won’t use more than 14% of its total power budget and can’t see the cooler fan speed anymore
Check power/power cabling. Sounds like something’s not getting detected correctly. I’m assuming 2x8pin? Try with just one, then just the other. It should put up a message and refuse to boot with incomplete power cabling. It might not, the Dell OEM cards are… Interesting. I also had a good deal on a Dell OEM Nvidia card. Never had so many issues. I hope you fare better.
If it fails to boot with either single power connector (so it’s checking them and seeing connections), but still hangs at 50W, then I would suspect the card. For obvious financial reasons, I’m hoping that’s not it, for you.
The card might still run even with insufficient cabling. Had a friend with a 3080, where one of the PSU connectors wasn’t plugged in fully. He could still boot to Desktop but every 3D accelerated game had horrid performance issues.