State of the hybrid GPU support in the EndeavourOS and PopOS

  1. With last nvidia drivers update I can finally use nvidia-only mode on my laptop “HP Victus 16 ryzen 5600h + rtx 3050ti”, without freezes and system nearly hanging after about 5 minutes uptime.

  2. Both Optimus Manager and EnvyControl are dealing great with handling gpu-mode switching, but I prefer EnvyControl for it’s simplicity of code and installation.

  3. External monitor finally properly working properly with KDE Plasma in nvidia-mode. But if there’s still no signal it’s good to check not only DE monitor setting, but in the NVIDIA settings => X Server Display Configuration, and try to turn on external monitor here.

  4. Somehow PopOS in compare to the EndeavourOS is capable to give HDMI signal to the external monitor in both hybrid and nvidia gpu modes. I have no idea how, but it works, and I realy wish to found how to copy this functionality into the Arch/EOS.

  5. It’s specifically PopOS feature, not GNOME or KDE Plasma incapability, I’ve tried EOS installation with GNOME, external monitor still didn’t worked in the hybrid mode.

Probably it detects if any HDMI connected, and if it is - automatically forces switch to NoVidia

The PopOS team also has official approval from Nvidia to make such things work. I could be wrong about this, but perhaps there is a licensing issue going on, why it isn’t available for other distros.

Keep in mind that PopOS isn’t your average distro, it is the official OS for System76 hardware.

To switch into different mode it’s requires a system reboot, so probably not.
Perhaps they’ve made a little trick and a hybrid mode is actually a discrete GPU mode too, but with a less power hungry battery management, which uses iGPU for the most of the time.

I’m quite aware that thanks to being driven by the commercial company they’re having more tuned hardware support and have a kind of partnership with Nvidia.

But, their repos and OS image are still open source, so possibly some of their precious nvidia-specific stuff could be ripped off into the other distros.

somehow the current state of Nvidia at the arch is not that perfect anyway.
The very new Nvidia GPUs like the 30xx are still nasty bleeding edge :wink:

@Matvey_Mochalov if you have POP! running you could check what versions of related Software they use and what kind of options are set to make it run smoothly.
But it could be also a thing about patches on packages like Nvidia Mesa and stuff.