Desktop animations lag after a few seconds of inactivity

Graphics / Linux Linux
1

After ~3 to 5 seconds of no input, desktop animations will lag for about half a second. For example, scrolling in Firefox looks quite jarring.

The issue is much worse at higher resolutions or when using display scaling. At 1080p with 100% scaling, it is essentially not noticeable.

Notes:

  • Disabling GSP firmware does not fix the issue.
  • Switching between the open-source and proprietary driver does not fix the issue.
  • Screen recording with OBS fixes the issue, but this is obviously not ideal.
  • The issue does not seem to occur with the Nouveau driver.

System specs:

  • Graphics Processor: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER
  • Driver: 570.86.16
  • Operating System: openSUSE Tumbleweed 20250216
  • KDE Plasma Version: 6.3.0
  • KDE Frameworks Version: 6.11.0
  • Qt Version: 6.8.2
  • Kernel Version: 6.13.2-1-default (64-bit)
  • Graphics Platform: Wayland
  • Processors: 28 × Intel® Core™ i7-14700F
  • Memory: 31.2 GiB
  • Manufacturer: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.
  • Product Name: MS-7D98

nvidia-bug-report.log.gz (2.5 MB)

2

I know this problem. It is the Nvidia GPU clock idle, does not react fast enough when there is activity. I have this same problem, and I was going to report it, until I found this report of the situation.

This issue did not happen before when I was using Pascal GPU.

The workaround is the set the powermizer using modprobe config.
put a config whatever you name it in the /etc/modprobe.d/
then, put this module load option. It will use a higher clock, but not maximum. It will still use adaptive, just the min clock and memory transfer rate is now higher.
options nvidia NVreg_RegistryDwords=“PerfLevelSrc=0x2222”
reboot or reload the driver.
Check in the powermizer, when idle to the lowest clock, activate the Gnome overview, there is no more lag.

3

This works, but considerably increases my idle power consumption.

An alternative solution I found is using nvidia-smi to set the minimum clock to be 1 above the idle range. This prevents the driver from ever going idle, with minimal difference in power.

4

I found, not only the GPU clock is low, the Memory clock is also too low in idle
When you set a lower supported memory clock, the desktop is just as bad, even when the GPU clock is higher than idle.

I don’t know why Nvidia made available such low memory clocks and GPU clocks that are not usable with lowest activities such as scroll a web page by one line. Mine is 210Mhz GPU and 810Mhz memory. It does not save more power, because the clock is going to go up anyway even when scroll one line.

I have to set to 405Mhz GPU and 5001Mhz Memory minimum performance state.

5

AFAIK it’s pretty low in windows too isn’t it? GPU Clock for sure. Dunno about memory.

How do I increase the memory clock only?

6

I don’t know about Windows. Does it have nvidia-smi?

nvidia-smi -lmc is set min,max memory clock.
Need to check supported memory clocks first using nvidia-smi -q -d supported_clocks

7

Thanks, I will try to increase it in Linux.
Yeah Windows got nvidia-smi

Update:
Doing this makes the GPU watt usage go up quite a bit.
I tried @morkysherk suggestion, I put the Graphics clock one step above the lowest. Not entierly sure but it feels “smoother” now…

Btw, the correct syntax for setting memory clocks are:
nvidia-smi -lmc <min>,<max>

And graphics clocks:
nvidia-smi -lgc <min>,<max>

8

Yes that is what stated above, -lmc is to set min, max memory clocks

I set memory clock only now, it will use the next up power level, without setting the min graphic clocks manually, the temperature goes down. This is still smooth.