Just bought 3080 - How to improve basic desktop animations and responsiveness vs AMD gpus

Graphics / Linux Linux
1

I run ArcoLinux KDE and have installed
nvidia-dkms nvidia-utils libvdpau nvtop

I then did a clean install and tried with nvidia-open-dkms - same.

I’m very disappointed in the desktop experience so far with NV - put simply it’s horrendous compared . I have tested with a 1070ti, 3050ti and now a brand new 3080 all have the EXACT same experience. Basic desktop animations skip frames. Stuff like the cursor bouncing or moving a window to the top and wobbly windows. They all skip frames. TBH you’d probably only notice it’s skipping frames if you literally just took out the AMD card. If I move a window from one screen to the other and back you will see a “jump / freeze frame”. Both monitors are identical btw.

If I take out the cpu (5950x) and put in an AMD 2200G. Butter smooth. Put the 5950x back and try with RX480 - butter smooth, put 5700XT butter smooth but I’m unable to get any of the NV cards to show smooth animations. In gaming sure they run great but the desktop perf is really poor. It also appears as if when opening some larger apps the cursor tends to “freeze” and moving your mouse from one monitor to the other skips. It even made me think my track ball was dirty. Put the AMD back and no issues.

I’m running a 5950x, 32GB ram and couple NVME’s.

Technically all the NV cards I tried should kill a cheap 2200G. It’s almost as if they are “throttling” for desktop use.

In testing some games I also noticed for Example Ashes has weird green shaders showing on all the units and it’s vulkan mode doesn’t run yet Dota using Vulkan does. Out of around 50 games in steam it’s a bit hit and miss whether they will run. These all run fine with any AMD gpu I put in.

I have tried a clean install of Manjaro (510) and also had a bit of a mixed bag. Ashes was capped at 25-30fps no matter the quality. Point is the performance appears to very erratic.

Only reason I bought the 3080 was for it’s tensor cores in Davinci Resolve but this user experience is giving me serious buyers remorse. I’m desperate. Windows gets around 25-30% SLOWER Davinci performance so I really don’t want to dual boot as all my games have run fine esp since Proton 7 with my AMD gpus.

Any ideas to get the same experience as I have with AMD gpus? I only have a day left to rectifiy these issues otherwise I can’t return it for a refund.

2

Don’t use KDE?
The KDE xorg compositor doesn’t really work with the prop. nvidia driver. You might have a better experience on Wayland.

3

Just to give an update. It appears to be a mix. KDE as you said doesn’t appear to play well with Nvidia. Secondly if I use 510 most of the game problems go away. It appears that 515 is a buggy beast. Using gnome the desktop animations are much smoother. In saying that though I still can’t use Vulkan on Ashes of the Singularity and the DX12 perf on Linux with AOS is around 60% the speed of Windows. My 5700XT gets faster fps on AOS and can run the vulkan exe. Any idea how to get full vulkan support on Linux with Nvidia?

4

Good question, AOS seems to be a mixed bag in general
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/1479
Regarding the nvidia driver, some users were reporting performance degrading on some proton games with the 510 driver compared with the 470 driver. Please check if AOS is affected by this by switching to 470.