Horrible performance with Nvidia

General system Gaming, sound and video
1

Hello!

Ever since i switched to a Nvidia 1060 3GB i’ve been getting really bad performance out of it with weird bugs in almost every game, and none of that behaviour is present when playing the same games in Windows.

Fps drops to single digits when changing in game resolution, overblown gamma when the game resolution doesn’t match the monitor resolution, memory leak like behaviour (FPS gradually dropping when certain UI elements are displayed and removed in game)…

I installed the driver using the EndeavourOS tool for doing that. But i’ve had those issues on Arch before that too. Meanwhile, the integrated Ryzen 5600g chip worked great, even if it was very underpowered.

The issues are the same across proton versions too, so i can only narrow it down to either the driver, kernel, or some interaction between the two. And the issues are very specific arcoss different games, so it can’t be a coincidence, or game specific. For instance, changing the resolution drops the FPS to single digits until restart. In almost every game i tried, different games, different engines, different proton versions.

Is it possible to troubleshoot this somehow? Or is this just the case of “nvidia on linux”?

Using Xfce4, so it’s definitely not Wayland.

Here’s the bug report that i sent Nvidia, it goes more in-depth about the issue, and has a video of what happens.

Am i just out of luck and Nvidia needs to fix this, or can i do something about it myself?

2

The problem of linux gaming.

Yes. It can be just “Nvidia is bad on Linux” and it’s still a valid reason to this day.

But it also could be many things:

  1. Have you checked protondb? some games requires certain launch options like this:

DXVK_FILTER_DEVICE_NAME=“[insert gpu here]” %command% …or
DRI_PRIME=1 DXVK_FILTER_DEVICE_NAME=“[insert gpu here]” %command%

  • because your system could have difficulties to set up/pick your gpu ← this may be very well the solution for your problem because I see you have iGPU from AMD.

  1. Depending on the games, some games runs better on Linux, many more simply does not.

  2. It could be the compositor.

  3. It could be the version of the proton (if you play on Steam).

  4. It could be you have not installed the propietary Nvidia driver.

Take your pick.

I recommend for you to post this on reddit.

3
  1. Yes, ProtonDB lists those games as gold or above, and there’s no fixes needed to be applied according to people. So it’s not proton related.

The iGPU is disabled in bios, so it’s not that. I’d know the difference between running Prey on 1440p/high on the dedicated and iGPU. Prey runs fine-ish the first time. The problem comes when changing resolutions. There’s no immediate “low performance”, games start as they should, but the performance i get is lower than on Windows + the bugs i mentioned.

Prey runs perfectly fine on Windows on ultra 1080p. But I can’t play on 1080p on linux because the gamma gets buggy.

Also, Prey is just an example, this happens to most games.

  1. Yeah, but what does that mean? If it runs it runs. The bugs are related to resolution changes, that has nothing to do with the game running well or not on linux. Especially if it’s universall across all games, so it’s not game related. It’s driver related.

  2. Haven’t thought of that. But i mean, if it is, what can i do about it?

  3. It’s not. Like i said, and mentioned in the bug report. It’s universal across games and proton versions. I even tried Wine-GE, it’s way worse than proton.

  4. I didn’t install it. EndeavourOS did. And there’s an exact version mentioned in the linked topic.

I pick Nvidia sucks and driver issues. :wink:

4

Upon further testing, disabling desktop composition makes it a bit better, but not quite. It really seems the drivers are at fault here. All i can do is wait i guess.

5

It’s probably Wayland and Nvidia. Wayland and Nvidia are buggy together in my experience. I recommend to use X11 if you can. (Edit: I see you are using X11)

Nvidia X server settings?

Your card has only 3GB on board. That limits how high you can ‘turn up’ the graphics in some games without taking a performance hit. This may be the problem, but i am not familiar with the game you are demonstrating.

There is also a 6GB version of the card, so some games will be OK with that version - still a little low for modern games.

Edit: OP uses X11, that i overlooked. Added info about 3GB and 6GB versions of 1060.

6

The same games were tested on WIndows, they ran at ultra settings 1080p.
If i try to do the same on Linux, compositor or no compositor, the FPS drops significantly, and it feels “wrong”. Not to mention that the gamma is overblown, memory leak when changing resolutions, FPS dropping gratually to single digits, and other glitches, that has nothing to do with the RAM amount on the card.

It’s clearly powerful enough to run what i want it to run, but there’s a huge descrepancy in performance between Linux and WIndows. And it’s not just “proton overhead”, proton shouldn’t be the reason those games run so badly (especially since ProtonDB lists them as fine and playable). Check the link, there’s a lot going on.

It’s a driver issue and/or some interaction with the OS or compositor.
I had simmilar issues with kwin on Plasma when i used AMD.

7

Have you tried to shut down and then disconnected one of the monitors? Then boot and try a game.

EOS seems to be finicky with more than 1 monitor connected.

Are you sure you are using the Nvidia board and not iGPU?

Otherwise i’m out of ideas except maybe try to remove and the install the Nvidia driver again.

8

Didn’t try disconnecting it physically, but i did try disabling one of them. It had no difference.
Besides, what do you mean by finnicky? And why EOS specifically? I had no trouble using both monitors, and some games even let you choose which one to display on.
And if not, i use the above mentioned, just shut one down (Super+P), and then use the one that i want.

Yes, i’m using Nvidia, the iGPU is disabled in BIOS, it’s not even detected with lspci -k.

Here:

07:00.0 Non-Essential Instrumentation [1300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Zeppelin/Raven/Raven2 PCIe Dummy Function (rev c9)
	Subsystem: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Zeppelin/Raven/Raven2 PCIe Dummy Function

When it’s on, this says AMD Renoir graphics, and the kernel driver loaded.

So it’s definitely not using the integrated graphics, and also, i’d know the difference between a processor GPU chip and an actual GPU. :wink: Cause i did use it for a while as the only GPU, and it can just about do 720p low on most games. This GPU does work some of the time, and some games (older games) don’t have issues.

Maybe it’s related to some modern game engines, idk…
But it’s definitely something with the drivers. Maybe they’ll fix it one day, who knows.

I did the automatic driver install with that EOS helper. It installed the DKMS package, maybe i should install the normal one? Would that make a difference?
I’m not super familiar with dracut though, and idk if i’d have to add different options and all that.

9

The Arch wiki has lots of useful info, see this:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA
if you haven’t already.

10

Your best bet is to wait Wayland to replace X11 properly (which hopefully push nvidia to support it). And by looking at some Dev who resist the changes to move towards Wayland implementation, so I guess you have to wait for 10-15 years (depending on your DE + Distro).

Anyway does it happen to other game or just that specific game?

12

Didn’t try disconnecting it physically, but i did try disabling one of them. It had no difference.
Besides, what do you mean by finnicky? And why EOS specifically?

Reading the forum daily i see many post with multi-monitor setup problems. (Also many post about boot problems after an update - but that is off topic)
Reading elsewhere these more-then-1-monitor problems seem to be less frequent.

What does EOS do differently? I don’t know.

13

xfce4 is also known to not be the best as host for gaming.

Tried other Desktops already? KDE, cinnamon?

14

In most cases the DE is causing trouble in less cases the GPU/driver is the issue.

But EndeavourOS is do nothing special to better support multidisplay setups, it is getting better in general. KDE per example was very bad with it, and is getting better and better over last year.

The only thing EndeavourOS is doing mainly is less that will interfere with changes which comes with the constant changes of a rolling system :wink:

15

Yeah, it happens in other games too. If i disable composition, it’s a bit better, but it’s not great in general. Especially compared to the performance in the same games i get in windows.
I’m not expecting 1:1 performance, but what i’m getting is way below what this card can do.

I have, thanks. I even tried all that when i used Arch itself, wasn’t much better there too.
It’s Nvidia, i’ll just have to live with it, not much i can do until they sort their stuff, or i get a new GPU.
Which won’t be Nvidia, i know that much… But it also won’t be soon.

I will never use KDE again, i have tried Gnome, but it was a bit weird on X11, i haven’t used Cinammon, but it’s based on Gnome (i think?) so it should be similar.
Gnome worked best though, so i might go back to Gnome and try.

Idk, when i used KDE, kwin was so agressively bad (still is last time i tried it), that it skipped frames in games. It would say 60 FPS or whatever, but looked like 15. It actually was drawing each 5th or so frame, insanely horrible. That was on X11, and moving windows looks like 15 FPS as well, not at all what i would call a modern DE experience.

On Wayland it was a bit better, smoother, but waking the computer from sleep would glitch the entire desktop, leaving artefacts all over, making it unusable. Or even during using it.

Xfwm compositor also causes issues because disabling it makes the games run a bit better.

The only one that didn’t interfere with gaming (as far as i could tell) was mutter from Gnome. Not that you can disable it anyway, so it’s hard to tell.

But desktop environments do affect things in a lot of cases. I don’t really know whose job it is to “make stuff work” as in - is Nvidia responsible for how kwin messes up frames or kwin, and the KDE devs need to stomp those bugs?

But the DE choice matters.

Xfce is really snappy and great, i love it, but it too has issues.

In any case, i’m stuck with this until Nvidia fixes things i guess.