20.04 nvidia-drivers are getting blurry by the minute - nouveau works, but...

[dyle71]

#!/bin/hi *

Tried Kubuntu 20.10 which had some severe Audio issues and other items, I radically decided to clean up my system and reinstall Kubuntu 20.04. Over an ongoing primal installation which has started with Kubuntu 15.10 (!!).
Been ever happy with it (well, most of the time). But Kubuntu 20.10 had some issues and therefore...

Now, I always used the proprietary nvidia-drivers for my

[FONT=monospace]$ lspci | grep -i nvidia
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: [COLOR=#FF5454][B]NVIDIA[/B][/COLOR] Corporation GP104 [GeForce GTX 1070] (rev a1)
01:00.1 Audio device: [COLOR=#FF5454][B]NVIDIA[/B][/COLOR] Corporation GP104 High Definition Audio Controller (rev a1)
[/FONT]

Yet, a fresh new install of the proprietary driver works.
At first.

But the display is getting blurry by the minute. The fonts seemed to be somehow washed out and crippled starting from a fine crisp display at first. I tried nvidia-driver-455, nvidia-driver-450 and nvidia-driver-390 (which totally refused). Then flickering, graphic artifacts, etc.

And after an hour I have to reboot or use the FOSS driver. The flickering and washy display is unusable.

Which is funny: because the nvidia-drivers *worked* from 15.10 to 20.10 on the very same machine! But a fresh new install of 20.04? Nope.

Now, falling back to nouveau works, but I'd also like to play some games with my Steam installment and I do think, that the nouveau driver can't compete with the proprietary when it comes to gaming. Also: do I have any chances to use the CUDA cores for some programming?

I'd like to use the performance of the original nvidia-driver. Agreed: I'd would be very cool and nice if they open-source that driver, but they didn't and I can't see them planning likewise.

Does anyone know of this and has found any remedy to that? Is this kwin somehow fiddling with the driver (composite stuff)?

[GreyGeek]

Did a little StartPage search and found this:

I had this blurring problem and traced it to enabling FXAA in Nvidia settings. Originally I enabled this feature out of curiosity and noticed no difference. I then forgot about it. Yesterday I applied available updates and suddenly this blurring problem presented. After much futile struggle, I recalled fiddling with the Nvidia settings and returned there. It says pretty plainly that enabling FXAA disables antialiasing, yet in my Kubuntu settings I had antialiasing enabled. For some reason just disabling FXAA did not restore expected behaviour -- I had to change the Application settings to Enhance, and then the blurring disappeared. It was then fine to go back to the default Application Settings.

[dyle71]

#!/bin/hi

Hm, I remember fiddling with the FXAA settings. I turned it off and the problems still prevailed.
However, I turned Font Anti-Aliasing in Kubuntu off, and made a

$ sudo update-driver install

again, which pulled in the nvidia-driver-455 and kicked nouveau. Yet, I can't help but nvidia and nouveau do have clearly different font rendering.

[FONT=monospace]$ xrandr --q1
SZ:    Pixels          Physical       Refresh
*0   1920 x 1200   ( 554mm x 342mm )  *50   
1   1920 x 1080   ( 554mm x 308mm )   51   
2   1680 x 1050   ( 484mm x 299mm )   52   
3   1600 x 1200   ( 461mm x 342mm )   53   
4   1440 x 900    ( 415mm x 256mm )   54   55   
5   1280 x 1024   ( 369mm x 292mm )   56   57   
6   1152 x 864    ( 332mm x 246mm )   58   
7   1024 x 768    ( 295mm x 219mm )   59   60   61   
8    800 x 600    ( 230mm x 171mm )   62   63   64   
9    640 x 480    ( 184mm x 136mm )   65   66   67   
10  1366 x 768    ( 394mm x 219mm )   68   
11  1280 x 800    ( 369mm x 228mm )   69   
12  1280 x 720    ( 369mm x 205mm )   70   
Current rotation - normal
Current reflection - none
Rotations possible - normal left inverted right  
Reflections possible - X Axis Y Axis[/FONT]

Reports correct values.

I give it a try again.

Thx for the hint.

[dyle71]

Nope. Without Font Aliasing the Desktop is plain ugly. With Aliasing (but FXAA off) I get this blurry in nvidia-driver-455. This is the start. It then gets quickly messy.
Going back to nouveau.

Well, a pity. Thx though.

Addendum: compare this to nouveau driver here:

[GreyGeek]

Strange. My GT 650M has been perfect with every version of Nvidia driver I try. I am currently at 390. It works great so unless a giant security hole shows up I won't be upgrading.

[dyle71]

Yes, this is strange.

So, I'm somehow forced to use nouveau. And what I can say? I'm impressed!

I know nouveau from back then when it was first time introduced. It was, well, eeerrm, ... it had "potential", to put mildly.

But now in 2020? It is fast, it works flawless, is supports the eye candy "Desktop effects". It has no problem to resume from suspend to RAM. I tried leaving my Chrome open on this resume and it worked smoothly. I can't help, but I have the slight impression that even Chrome itself is *faster* with the hardware acceleration settings on in nouveau.

I really get the sense, that this is a real alternative to the proprietary driver. I may get some demanding games on Steam flying with this. Well, at least, "Among Us" will surely go... =)

For the couple of hours I'm now on nouveau I'm really surprised and I have to apologize for my prejudgment of the FOSS driver been inferior.

Heck, there's even a slight kwin "hick-up" I know of, when closing a LibreOffice Calc window: it somehow remains visible in the taskbar and needs about 1-2 sec to vanish there. Until then the whole desktop is frozen. This does not happen every time, but often enough to get noticed. I wonder if this is also happening for the nouveau driver...

I'll keep on using nouveau for now. So this thread is not really "solved", technically speaking. What should I do?

[claydoh]

I will almost guarantee that games using any even somewhat serious graphics will reduce your great impressions of the open source driver. It has improved tons in recent years, but still lags behind performance-wise. It will be interesting to see what sort of results you will get. I don't mind being proven wrong here

[dyle71]

@claydoh: Hm, yes. That seems the case...

I've installed Bioshock Infinite and set it to 1920*1200 with very high qualities. With nouveau Steam shows me around 12-15 FPS at the introduction scene on the board. Which is rather poor.

These are the details:

[FONT=monospace]$ n[/FONT][FONT=monospace]eofetch --off
[COLOR=#FF5454][B]dyle[/B][/COLOR]@[COLOR=#FF5454][B]novigrad[/B][/COLOR]  
-------------  
[COLOR=#FF5454][B]OS[/B][/COLOR]: Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS x86_64  
[COLOR=#FF5454][B]Kernel[/B][/COLOR]: 5.4.0-57-generic  
[COLOR=#FF5454][B]Uptime[/B][/COLOR]: 2 hours, 11 mins  
[COLOR=#FF5454][B]Packages[/B][/COLOR]: 2492 (dpkg)  
[COLOR=#FF5454][B]Shell[/B][/COLOR]: bash 5.0.17  
[COLOR=#FF5454][B]Resolution[/B][/COLOR]: 1920x1200  
[COLOR=#FF5454][B]DE[/B][/COLOR]: Plasma  
[COLOR=#FF5454][B]WM[/B][/COLOR]: KWin  
[COLOR=#FF5454][B]Theme[/B][/COLOR]: Breeze [Plasma], Breeze [GTK2/3]  
[COLOR=#FF5454][B]Icons[/B][/COLOR]: breeze [Plasma], breeze [GTK2/3]  
[COLOR=#FF5454][B]Terminal[/B][/COLOR]: konsole  
[COLOR=#FF5454][B]Terminal Font[/B][/COLOR]: Hack 8  
[COLOR=#FF5454][B]CPU[/B][/COLOR]: Intel i7-4790 (8) @ 4.000GHz  
[COLOR=#FF5454][B]GPU[/B][/COLOR]: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070  
[COLOR=#FF5454][B]Memory[/B][/COLOR]: 4687MiB / 32054MiB
[/FONT]

... and this system should deliver more than 12-15 FPS in Bioshock Infinite. I'll try this on the very same Machine with Windows 7 and the native proprietary nvidia driver too.

Addendum: installed Bioshock Infinite on the very same machine but with Windows 7 and the proprietary nvida driver: 60 FPS (upper FPS cut; no frame drop), on 1920x1200, Very High Details.

/me == sad. -.-

[claydoh]

I switched to AMD on my PCs for graphics because I was tired of the constant tweaking and experimentation I had to do to get things to work in a reasonable manner, consistently.

No more proprietary drivers, no tweaking, *maybe* an upgrade to mesa via a PPA.

Granted I don't have the latest blingy GPU but my old ish rx480 ran Bioshock Infinite just fine though I can't recall the settings or fps.



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