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auoax

Member

Registered: 2025-03-18

Posts: 5

[SOLVED] Wayland/KDE only works with hybrid Nvidia-AMD graphics

I've been using this Wayland/KDE setup as my daily driver and I have been very happy with it. I have Nvidia RTX 5070 as my discrete GPU and I am using the official nvidia (proprietary) drivers. Recently I tried gaming on Linux just to see how much it has evolved, I have some bad experiences from the past (not really the fault of Linux, the games were developed for Windows and relied on quirky non-standard stuff Wine couldn't cope with) so I didn't expect much. Much to my surprise performance was actually better than on Windows. I noticed a small amount of input lag, which 99% of people wouldn't even notice but I'm picky like that, and I'm looking to fix it.

One of the obvious things to try is disabling hybrid graphics and using only my Nvidia GPU. That's actually it was meant to be from the beginning, since graphics performance was really great I thought I'm using the Nvidia GPU all the time but I realized that "Integrated graphics: Auto" in the UEFI actually means both are enabled and it's been using integrated GPU for KDE desktop the whole time and discrete GPU when needed.

After changing the iGPU UEFI setting to "Disabled", console still works but when I start KDE (on Wayland) I get a black screen and my monitor says "No signal" after a while. Turning iGPU back on, KDE works again. Note to anyone struggling with the same issue, changing iGPU back to "Auto" no longer works as it seems to default to the last setting, you have to change it to "Forced". Presumably you can change it back to "Auto" after you've booted on "Forced" once.

I'm not using any kernel command line settings. Neither have I blacklisted any modules. I have the nvidia-utils package and according to Wiki it'll enable needed modules for Wayland (modeset, fbdev) by default. So far everything has been working out of box so I'm a bit wary of blindly making changes unless there is a good reason to do so.

Am I missing something obvious here? I tried to skim through the NVIDIA/Tips and tricks, NVIDIA/Troubleshooting and earlier forum topics I could find but I'm not sure if most of the advice is relevant (considering a lot of it was Xorg related which screams ancient to me) to the new nvidia drivers anymore. AFAIK there was quite significant changes few months ago when they switched to open sourcing parts of their drivers to upstream and since my GPU is so new I'm using these all new drivers whereas I don't think many older Nvidia GPUs, especially outside the last few generations, are using these drivers.

Last edited by auoax (2025-07-08 23:09:26)

seth

Member

From: Don't DM me only for attention

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 74,097

Re: [SOLVED] Wayland/KDE only works with hybrid Nvidia-AMD graphics

After changing the iGPU UEFI setting to "Disabled", console still works but when I start KDE (on Wayland) I get a black screen and my monitor says "No signal" after a while.

Likely https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/KDE#Un … lution_set (the output names unfortunately are not harmonized among the drivers, let alone when indirection on hybrid systems is involved)

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auoax

Member

Registered: 2025-03-18

Posts: 5

Re: [SOLVED] Wayland/KDE only works with hybrid Nvidia-AMD graphics

After changing the iGPU UEFI setting to "Disabled", console still works but when I start KDE (on Wayland) I get a black screen and my monitor says "No signal" after a while.

Likely https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/KDE#Un … lution_set (the output names unfortunately are not harmonized among the drivers, let alone when indirection on hybrid systems is involved)

Actually for some reason I don't even have the ~/.local/share/kscreen/ folder. Weird.

I managed to resolve this myself, this is a bit embarrassing but I had accidentally left KWIN_DRM_NO_AMS set in my env. Quite a few places recommend setting that flag as KDE disables screen tearing by default and it can cause input lag in some cases. I thought I had reverted the changes so I did not consider this as a potential cause in my original post. And it turns out that you can't enable screen tearing on these new Nvidia drivers, that's how it's implemented. On the bright side I now have considerably less input lag when just using my Nvidia GPU, it must be GPU and driver dependent if screen tearing actually has any negative effect or not.

Last edited by auoax (2025-07-08 23:22:57)