this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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I am trying to repeat my 10 Benchmarks video on my 3080M laptop, which I haven't really used for a while apart from testing NVK. I had forgotten just HOW much Nvidia sucks. I had to reinstall the OS cause OpenSUSE stopped booting after I installed the drivers the first time. X11 is ALSO buggy on Nvidia and crashes randomly. windows won't show, the Steam Friends List window hangs. This is almost unusable.

NAK and GSP cannot be merged soon enough so I can get rid of this proprietary atrocity.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Earlier this year I had a months long issue where my desktop image would freeze if I set its refresh rate higher than 120. I thought my GPU was breaking up, but I finally found a post on the Nvidia forum where someone else had the same issue and realized that it was because of the newest driver. It took months for Nvidia to fix that. Two months ago I just decided to switch to AMD and sold my Nvidia card and haven't had any issues with AMD so far.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

To be fair AMD recently had a bug where the 6000 series GPUs would sit at 96 mhz unless you set your refresh rate below 100hz and that also took a couple months to be fixed. I was randomly getting 20fps in every game until I managed to find this gitlab issue. It started in kernel 6.4 and wasn't fixed until 6.6 so I had to play at 90hz on my 165hz monitor for that whole span.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (4 children)

This is why LTS kernels are a good thing. I used 6.1 that entire time and didn't even know the issue existed on my 6700XT

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I'm someone that likes to tinker and be on the bleeding edge, but I agree, LTS makes sense on hardware that is more than 6 months old or so.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah, same reason I use LTS. Latest features are nice and all but I want a stable system for my everyday life.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

LTS is no guarantee that there wont be bugs, 6.1 recently had a bug with NFS where it corrupted files.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I didn't say it was?

You do get fewer bugs, though, and equally frequent hotfixes

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No you didnt, I was just trying to say that you're not safe either way.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Safety is a sliding scale. You're certainly safer than bleeding edge

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

My 3080M won't go higher than 80W on Linux for the past 3 years that I have this laptop. I tried both the 535 and 545 drivers, still same issue. This is absolutely unacceptable.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Nvidia is the best for Windows. But, if you want the best on Linux and Windows Amd is good

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

It is the best if you are paying for the top of the top. In the medium spectrum is probably better to go AMD or Intel cause the cost/benefit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nvidia won’t even let you use their software on Windows if you don’t give them your user data. Hardly the best.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That’s only if you care about the GeForce Experience software, I don’t even have it installed so it doesn’t bug me about updates. You can download and install drivers any time without signing in to an account.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

reinstall the OS cause OpenSUSE stopped booting

Just do a snapper rollback. It's pretty easy:

  1. Boot from older kernel in the boot menu and check if it works
  2. Run sudo snapper rollback
  3. Reboot

Boom, saved you a reinstall.

Alternatively, you can set up zypper to keep old NVIDIA packages, then just login to a CLI and install the older driver package, then reboot. I did that a few times as well, but the snapper rollback was easier.

X11 is ALSO buggy

I didn't have any of those issues for the 3-ish years I was on Tumbleweed and NVIDIA. I'm now still on Tumbleweed, but have switched to AMD for proper Wayland support

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanx for the rollback command! :)

And yeah, some games wouldn't even boot. So I'm doing 5 games in this benchmark after all. Perhaps it's cause it's an Optimus laptop.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Perhaps. It's been years since I messed with that. In fact, my last laptop I opted for an AMD APU and no GPU so I wouldn't need to deal with graphics switching.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I guess mileage might differ. I installed Tumbleweed and then the Nvidia drivers following the wiki instructions. Everything is going great. Running a 3060 with Wayland+Plasma on a 360Hz screen and gaming through Steam. I love Tumbleweed.

An alternative if just for benchmarking is EndeavourOS, you can choose proprietary Nvidia drivers as a boot option in the installer and then I believe it'll be installed with them without further ado. Downside is if you use it long term you have to read Arch News before updates to spot breaking/incompatible changes and be knowledagable of things like pacnew/pacsave files, etc.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Nah, I have same issues. My hardware is 2 years old. I use manjaro/Ubuntu LTS and Non-LTS/PopOS/LinuxMint/Zorin/LMDE/Nobara and endeavour OS and it's freezing quite often and I have to go back to Windows atm. I think Nvidia is main culprit here. If I move to Full AMD. I might try Linux again

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I reinstalled Tumbleweed and it worked fine. Have a 3080M vs 6800M benchmark coming up once it's done transcoding.