So the NV driver dies when I run games if I have 6 monitors plugged in.
(4 monitors on the NV and 2 on the CPUs IGP.)
What if I pick up another NV card? Like a 4060 or whatever. That way I can disable the IGP and just use the NV driver.
Will I then be able to drive 3 monitors off the 3080ti and 3 off the 4060, have all 6 as proper screens in X and have games work?
Well, picked up a RTX4060 and installed it.
Works great in Windows. But it worked great in Windows with 2 of the screens connected to the Intel onboard before, so not really a win.
In linux (OpenSUSE Tumbleweed) with the 565 drivers, out of the box it detects all 6 screens, but activating the two on the new GPU doesn’t work - screens stay blank.
nvidia-settings detects both cards, lets me generates an xorg.conf file with the 2 monitors on the new GPU connected to screen 1, while the other 4 are on screen 0. After rebooting with the generated xorg.conf file KDE only sees the 4 monitors connected to the primary video card and the other 2 screens stay blank.
I CAN start stuff on the other screen with e.g “DISPLAY=”:0.1" xterm" and xterm starts on the other screens, but I can’t move the mouse over to get to it, and there’s no window controls…
Any ideas?
Got a little farther… screens were overlapped in nvidia-settings. When I set them so they were beside each other (and made the appropriate physical changes so the right-most two monitors were on the 2nd GPU) I can now move the mouse over to them. But it’s just an X. No WM on the 2nd X server.
I’ve tried to set up Mosaic, but it doesn’t seem to work.
Maybe this is a limit of KDE. Maybe I can run a 2nd window manager on the other screen? Maybe having a tiling WM on those screens would work. Even if I can’t move windows back and forth between the screens that’d be OK.
Was also thinking that maybe I could run a VM and pass the 2nd GPU into it, and then use something like Symless to get the KMB shared between the host and VM…
TBH, I’m surprised this is such a hassle. It “just works” in windows.
AwesomeWM is able to run on screen :0.1 so at least I can start stuff on those screens now. Not ideal, but better than nothing.
Still trying to find a way to get the screens actually integrated with KDE, but losing hope.
So… I’m giving up on this. The nVidia drivers on linux just aren’t up to par with their Windows counterparts.
It just doesn’t work well enough. Instead, I’m going to back to using the IGP for the extra two monitors. It works sooo much better that way.