[SOLVED] nVidia Proprietary drivers making performance awful

kaztal · 2015-11-09 18:07:02

Hi,

I've spent most my short time on Arch using the nouveau drivers and it's been working fine for browsing and watching Youtube, but I recently wanted to get Steam working so I downloaded the proprietary nVidia drivers as I understand they're better for gaming. However, they've slugged up my system real good. Most elementary animations are very sluggish, you can even see stuttering when large blocks of text appear in the terminal before I run startx at all. Feels very awkward.

I've a GTX 760 card. It worked great on Windows. I've done my best to uninstall the nouveau drivers. I've tried using the nvidia-xconfig command, but typically it'll break startx after I run it (it complains about not finding any displays) so I'm not too keen on running it.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Last edited by kaztal (2015-11-10 20:19:15)

cafe · 2015-11-09 19:10:07

Make sure you don't have the nouveau module on your /etc/mkinitcpio.conf. If it is there, no matter what you install it will always be loaded.

You can check witch module is loaded running :

$ lsmod | grep "\(^nouveau\|^nvidia\)"

And also, for steam, you will need the 32-bit version of the driver too:

# pacman -S lib32-nvidia-libgl

Last edited by cafe (2015-11-09 19:13:04)

kaztal · 2015-11-09 19:26:13

cafe wrote:

Make sure you don't have the nouveau module on your /etc/mkinitcpio.conf. If it is there, no matter what you install it will always be loaded.
You can check witch module is loaded running :
$ lsmod | grep "$^nouveau\|^nvidia$"
And also, for steam, you will need the 32-bit version of the driver too:
# pacman -S lib32-nvidia-libgl

Hey, thanks for your response. The first command returns

nvidia               8622080  28

so I suppose that looks good. I find no reference to nouveau in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf. It also doesn't mention nvidia - should it?

Thanks again.

WorMzy · 2015-11-09 19:40:21

Anything suspicious in your X log/journal?

Did you remember to install the complementary -libgl package for your nvidia driver?

cafe · 2015-11-09 19:50:04

kaztal wrote:

It also doesn't mention nvidia - should it?

No, it shouldn't.

Here's another thing you can try next.
Check if you have xf86-video-nv package installed.

You can also configure Xorg to load nvidia module using a configuration file in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf with the following :

Section "Device"
        Identifier "Nvidia Card"
        Driver "nvidia"
        VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
        Option "NoLogo" "true"
EndSection

This is all documented in the NVIDIA page in the wiki

kaztal · 2015-11-09 19:53:59

WorMzy wrote:

Anything suspicious in your X log/journal?
Did you remember to install the complementary -libgl package for your nvidia driver?

Well, that was easy. I had mesa-libgl installed. Installed and replaced nvidia-libgl. Logged out and back in. Works like a charm. Thanks for the help, I really appreciate it.

WorMzy · 2015-11-09 20:43:24

Great stuff. Please remember to mark your thread as solved by editing your first post and amending the title.

Arch Linux

#1 2015-11-09 18:07:02

[SOLVED] nVidia Proprietary drivers making performance awful

#2 2015-11-09 19:10:07

Re: [SOLVED] nVidia Proprietary drivers making performance awful

#3 2015-11-09 19:26:13

Re: [SOLVED] nVidia Proprietary drivers making performance awful

#4 2015-11-09 19:40:21

Re: [SOLVED] nVidia Proprietary drivers making performance awful

#5 2015-11-09 19:50:04

Re: [SOLVED] nVidia Proprietary drivers making performance awful

#6 2015-11-09 19:53:59

Re: [SOLVED] nVidia Proprietary drivers making performance awful

#7 2015-11-09 20:43:24

Re: [SOLVED] nVidia Proprietary drivers making performance awful

Board footer