Drivers: NVIDIA or not if never going to use 3D?

General system Kernel, boot, graphics & hardware
1

See the title, basically.
I saw a tip on (somewhere) the other day that the absolutely best way to avoid tearing in Linux if you run NVIDIA is to well… don’t. This hinges on not having a need for 3D rendering.

Thoughts on this? I don’t get tears in videos, but then I have set MPV to use hardware rendering. I DO get awful tearing when scrolling or moving windows around in all desktop environments except Gnome and Cinnamon (both using a different compositor than any other DE I have tried (Mutter / Muffin, closely related).

2

I’m not sure what you are saying here? I have an Nvidia GTX 1060 6 GB desktop card and have no issues running nvidia-dkms.

3

It may be hit-or-miss with nVidia, I don’t know. But Im running a GeForce GTX 770 2GB memory from eVga (nVidia GK104) with with nvidia 440.44-5 driver; no problems, no tearing. KDE/Plasma. This is an older card but runs just fine on the latest nvidia drivers.

Click for my inxi summary

My desktop system. 

System:    Host: brick Kernel: 5.4.6-arch1-1 x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 9.2.0 
           Desktop: KDE Plasma 5.17.4 tk: Qt 5.14.0 wm: kwin_x11 dm: SDDM Distro: Arch Linux 
Machine:   Type: Desktop Mobo: Micro-Star model: B450 TOMAHAWK MAX (MS-7C02) v: 1.0 
           serial: <root required> UEFI: American Megatrends v: 3.30 date: 09/17/2019 
CPU:       Topology: 6-Core model: AMD Ryzen 5 2600 bits: 64 type: MT MCP arch: Zen+ rev: 2 
           L2 cache: 3072 KiB 
           flags: avx avx2 lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 sse4a ssse3 svm 
           bogomips: 81615 
           Speed: 1335 MHz min/max: 1550/3400 MHz Core speeds (MHz): 1: 1433 2: 2741 3: 1374 
           4: 1376 5: 1442 6: 1375 7: 1376 8: 1376 9: 1880 10: 3894 11: 1555 12: 1377 
Graphics:  Device-1: NVIDIA GK104 [GeForce GTX 770] vendor: eVga.com. driver: nvidia 
           v: 440.44 bus ID: 26:00.0 chip ID: 10de:1184 
           Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.6 driver: nvidia compositor: kwin_x11 tty: N/A 
           Message: Unable to show advanced data. Required tool glxinfo missing. 
Audio:     Device-1: NVIDIA GK104 HDMI Audio vendor: eVga.com. driver: snd_hda_intel 
           v: kernel bus ID: 26:00.1 chip ID: 10de:0e0a 
           Device-2: AMD Family 17h HD Audio vendor: Micro-Star MSI driver: snd_hda_intel 
           v: kernel bus ID: 28:00.3 chip ID: 1022:1457 
           Device-3: Logitech USB Headset H540 type: USB 
           driver: hid-generic,snd-usb-audio,usbhid bus ID: 1-4:2 chip ID: 046d:0a37 
           Sound Server: ALSA v: k5.4.6-arch1-1 
Network:   Device-1: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet 
           vendor: Micro-Star MSI driver: r8169 v: kernel port: f000 bus ID: 22:00.0 
           chip ID: 10ec:8168 
           IF: enp34s0 state: up speed: 1000 Mbps duplex: full mac: 00:d8:61:ab:1b:bc 
Drives:    Local Storage: total: 5.91 TiB used: 1.30 TiB (22.0%) 
           ID-1: /dev/sda vendor: Samsung model: SSD 860 EVO 1TB size: 931.51 GiB 
           speed: 6.0 Gb/s serial: S3Z6NB0M202973Z 
           ID-2: /dev/sdb vendor: Crucial model: CT500MX500SSD1 size: 465.76 GiB 
           speed: 6.0 Gb/s serial: 1809E131342B 
           ID-3: /dev/sdc vendor: Seagate model: ST5000DM000-1FK178 size: 4.55 TiB 
           speed: 6.0 Gb/s serial: W4J0SRJW 
Partition: ID-1: / size: 57.42 GiB used: 17.29 GiB (30.1%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda2 
           ID-2: /home size: 842.36 GiB used: 158.51 GiB (18.8%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda3 
           ID-3: swap-1 size: 15.62 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) fs: swap dev: /dev/sda4 
Sensors:   System Temperatures: cpu: 34.0 C mobo: 33.0 C gpu: nvidia temp: 35 C 
           Fan Speeds (RPM): fan-1: 0 fan-2: 856 fan-3: 730 fan-4: 0 fan-5: 1120 fan-6: 1114 
           gpu: nvidia fan: 41% 
Info:      Processes: 262 Uptime: 2h 03m Memory: 15.65 GiB used: 971.4 MiB (6.1%) 
           Init: systemd v: 244 Compilers: gcc: 9.2.0 Shell: bash v: 5.0.11 
           running in: konsole inxi: 3.0.37
4

I can run the Nvidia but i am using the dkms version. This card seems to work on the open source also. I’m not a gamer but i don’t notice any issues with it. First Nvidia card i have used. My new Ryzen i opted for the AMD RX590. Well see how that works out. I’m running Cinnamon right now on this Nvidia but i’m looking at KDE/Plasma on the new one. Still trying to figure out KDE and how it all works. How did you put the inxi summary on the page? Is it a link? How do you do that? I don’t know this platform on the forum well either. :slightly_smiling_face:

5

Type some text. And then put the following in your edit screen.

<details>
<summary>
<i>Click for output</i>
</summary>
<p> Some descriptor or text.
Anything you put between <p> and </p> will be collapsed
</p>
</details>

Some more text if you want.

Note: if you use the three backtics trick to insert code in the collapsed portion a blank line before the first set of backtics is required.

1 Like
6

Oh…some good old html? Interesting!