Changed from AMD to NVIDIA GPU, certain programs lag?

Issues & Assistance
1

I just switched from the AMD 6800XT to a NVIDIA RTX 4080 Super. I am running the nvidia-open-dkms drivers and wayland on KDE Plasma.

Most programs run just the way they did when using the AMD card. But Steam, Proton Mail and some other programs feels like they are locked to 10-15 fps. Very laggy and hard to navigate them. Are there any documented fixes for this? I’ve tried searching but haven’t found any topics online matching my problems.

To make sure it was not a problem with the drivers I also completely fresh installed CachyOS with the latest February .iso to make sure everything was up to date.

2

Try switching to the closed driver. GSP is known to cause stutters and a fix is otw for the next version.

3

Alright, I tried looking at the wiki to see how to make the switch from open to closed. stumbled across sudo pacman -S linux-cachyos-nvidia and ran it and said yes to replace linux-cachyos-nvidia-open. Restarted my system but when running chwd I am still running nvidia-open-dkms. also tried running chwd -i nvidia-dkms but then I get the output Error: no matching device for profile <U+2068>'nvidia-dkms'<U+2069> found!. Trying to find a direction to go from here to switch to the proprietary drivers but a bit unsure where to go from here.

4

Update:

I ran lshw -c video and my output shows driver=nvidia, so I think that my system is running the proprietary drivers. All the programs I mentioned before are still running very laggy, even with GSP disabled in nvidia.conf.

Just switched back to open through pacman and it didn’t change the lshw output so that didn’t confirm anything at all so disregard that part.

5

Yeah, that’s completely fine. chwd doesn’t know past the install process that you modified your system, so chwd is oblivious to driver switching via pacman. Are these apps you’ve mentioned being software accelerated by any change instead of hardware? IDK if you can verify that in any way.

6

I know at least for Steam it has an option in the interface settings to choose hardware acceleration on or off for webview. Tried both settings to no improvement. I am honestly not sure how and if i can check the other apps.

Since the change in behaviour started with the switch from AMD to NVIDIA I am asuming there’s something these apps have in common that impacts the rendering of them Interestingly the regular discord client also has this issue, but Vesktop (a third party client) runs buttery smooth.

I can confirm however the driver change did work because I ran the new Monster Hunter Wilds benchmark with the open-dkms and closed drivers respectively to massive performance differences in favor of the open drivers.

Just a bit unsure where to continue from here since these apps simply are stuck rendering at 10fps pretty much. The actual windows being dragged around are smooth but the contents inside the windows are affected.

7

Another update. This seems to be exclusive to KDE. I tried running Gnome and there all the programs I have mentioned run fine. I still vastly prefer KDE so I will stick with it, but it seems to be KDE + NVIDIA that causes the lag.

8

Can you check Plasma Renderer there? Try forcing it to OpenGL if it’s on Automatic or change it to Automatic if it’s set to Software.

9

I haven’t been able to find any info on plasma renderer. How would I go about forcing it / setting it to OpenGL / Automatic?

10

In this case, press P and the KDE search will open. There you can complete the search term and open it.

Alternatively, you can start Krunner with Ctrl + F or open the terminal and enter krunner.

11

image
image879×687 65.8 KB

12

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. i don’t know why I didn’t just try searching for it in the system search haha.

I have set Rendering Backend to Open GL and restarted the system as well and it does nothing. Still the same behaviour in all the same programs.

It would be interesting to figure out what makes this lag on KDE and not GNOME

13

I have also tried KDE Plasma under X11 and that fixes it as well. Much worse general desktop performance compared to Wayland but the laggy programs all run as they should.