[dismalaf]

I have a 3050 laptop GPU. Nouveau is fine for basic desktop usage. Even for 3D games it's shockingly good (on Vulkan games anyway). I haven't really noticed much difference between Nouveau and the proprietary drivers to be honest...

The biggest thing I notice is that the card is severely lacking VRAM, to the point where most of the games I play run better on the iGPU (which can make use of up to 16gb of system RAM).

[Bancakes]

I’m actually shocked you got it to play games like that. I have several nvidia laptops that I use ranging from a 750M, to gtx 1650, to a rtx 4050. Every couple of months I’ll switch back to the dedicated GPU to run a sanity check for features, and do a 180 in an hour. I understand making compromises on shadowplay, GeForce streaming, the control centre, and the nvidia app as a whole. But I always notice microstuttering that shouldn’t be there and draw the line at having to manually set up VDPAU/VAAPI and keeping up with the trends of what this year’s optimal way to install games is (which DE on which back end, playonlinux vs lutris vs winetricks vs proton, etc).

I’m glad you got your 3050 to do basic things and hope you get more use out of it as software improves.

NB: IMO the best Linux nvidia laptops are the Lenovo legions. They have a bios switch to force the use of the nvidia chip and mask the iGPU. Half the issues are gone then.

[throwaway314155]

> which DE on which back end, playonlinux vs lutris vs winetricks vs proton, etc

KDE on Proton is the way.

[vlovich123]

Are you using Wayland? One thing I’ve noticed is that windows are allocated greedily in Wayland and Chrome in particular is more than happy to eat all your VRAM. There’s nothing like there is in Windows/Mac to swap out / drop and recreate existing allocations when you’re out of VRAM.

[dismalaf]

Yes I'm using Wayland. The problem has nothing to do with Chrome usage or whatever. The desktop is super smooth no matter how many Chrome tabs I have or other apps. Also Gnome likes to use the iGPU by default so nothing to do with the Nvidia GPU really. For games I've tested both with iGPU or forcing them to use the Nvidia GPU.

The problem is games which have a lot of high res textures, it's obvious the dedicated GPU runs out of RAM. It's pretty speedy on games running at half-resolution and it can render a lot of effects like bloom, fancy lighting, reflections, etc... But I'd say my current go to game is Civ 6, I like to play at full resolution with high textures, which the dedicated GPU can't handle but the iGPU can without even heating up all that much.

[Bancakes]

You’re talking about swap? You can allocate a swap partition and register it in the fstab and the kernel as well and happily swap out to it. Unlike windows and mac, you can set the swappiness too to go from conservative to aggressive.

[vlovich123]

Not RAM to disk swap. We’re talking about VRAM/RAM here.