this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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[–] hyper@lemmy.zip 18 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I wish I could. My gaming rig has an nvidia gpu and linux support really sucks because of the proprietary driver situation...
Steams new gamepad ui is a slideshow running at 5fps and I loose HDR so I have to remain on Windows for now. Every other desktop I own is UNIX tho.

[–] CeeBee@lemmy.world 13 points 2 years ago (2 children)

linux support really sucks because of the proprietary driver situation.

Stop listening to everyone online. The driver situation "sucks" because of ideologies (which I happen to agree with), but from a functionality perspective Nvidia's Linux drivers are solid.

The same driver you install is the same driver they use in their half a million dollar DGX AI systems. And those systems don't run Windows. Only Linux.

[–] BURN@lemmy.world 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Those drivers are stable, but older. I get errors playing new games because my drivers are always 5-10 versions older than their windows equivalents.

[–] CeeBee@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

That could be a consequence of the distro you're using. I'm going to guess you're using Ubuntu and maybe an older LTS.

If that's the case you can switch to use the Nvidia driver PPA. It'll give you the latest drivers.

[–] veng@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

He's right about the new gamepad UI for steam though... it's completely unusable in Linux from my experience (the old big picture UI worked fine)

[–] CeeBee@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I don't know why you're having that issue, but I have three systems with Nvidia cards (1080ti, 2060 laptop, 1660 laptop) that I use Steam on and the new big picture mode is entirely usable. It's not perfect, and does hiccup someone's, but it works fine.

[–] veng@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I'm guessing the laptops are using Optimus and are maybe running big picture using the integrated graphics, hence being smoother on them. 1080ti I don't know, maybe it's just in issue with RTX cards or something. iirc it was to do with HW acceleration but not sure

[–] CeeBee@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

Nope. I made sure the Nvidia card is used for everything.

[–] init@lemmy.ml 11 points 2 years ago

A few others have mentioned Pop_OS! for their Nvidia driver support which is what I'm running too. I think I'm on version 535.93 or something like that. Most of the Ubuntu downstream (Ubuntu, mint, pop_os, etc,.) already include The proprietary drivers in their repos. Pop_OS is known for Nvidia support being a bit quicker than the others.

I'd suggest looking into dual booting (thats what I do, there are a few things that work better on windows). It's super easy to set up, and it's an easy low risk way to see if it works for you.

[–] bobman@unilem.org 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I use a gaming laptop with an Nvidia GPU and linux support does not 'really suck.'

The only downside I have is one you wouldn't experience because you're not using a laptop.

[–] Intralexical@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The only downside I have is one you wouldn’t experience because you’re not using a laptop.

Optimus/Bumblebee/IGPU switching/whatever?

[–] bobman@unilem.org 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It's just optimus now.

The issue is that in order for a program to use the dedicated GPU, I need to launch it with prime-run prepended to it.

[–] Intralexical@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

There's probably some programs that you always want to run with the dedicated GPU, though.

Copy the launchers for those from /usr/share/applications to ~/.local/share/applications, and edit the Exec= line to include prime-run?

Or, assuming prime-run is inheritable (since otherwise apps that need renderer subprocesses wouldn't work), run an application launcher/menu itself with prime-run?

Actually, it looks like prime-run just sets a couple environment variables anyway. So set those however you want for each program.

What does "NVIDIA Control Panel" look like these days? It's been a couple years since I've seen it. No options in there?

I'm assuming you still want the IGPU and not the discrete GPU for rendering the desktop/simple programs, for power consumption and performance reasons, so you're not willing to just turn the IGPU off or stick your entire session under prime-run or export its environment variables in ~/.profile or whatever.


It looks like there are also GPU switcher taskbar applets for both KDE and GNOME. This sounds like it would be easy enough.

…I think back when I was setting up a NVIDIA laptop, I might have just put a toggle for optimus-manager somewhere, or something.