Background: I’ve been tinkering with an Aorus Gaming Box eGPU with a 1080 installed, for Windows I’ve gotten it to work nicely but Fedora is another case entirely. I’ve managed to install the proprietary NVIDIA drivers, so my system now accepts the eGPU without my Wayland session freezing. I’ve also installed the egpu-switcher script, but I can’t tell if it’s working or not.
Most people recommend using an external screen connected to the eGPU so the video signal doesn’t have to travel back through the thunderbolt cable. However, when I do this anything related to my screen becomes incredibly slow. Even just moving the mouse cursor produces noticeable lag, and most actions happen at what I think is about 10 fps. Interestingly, moving an application to the internal screen of my Framework speeds it way up to normal performance. This makes me think that my internal graphics might still be doing the bulk of the work, and that the video is being (very slowly) fed into the VRAM of the eGPU.
Can anyone help me with getting better performance?
Unfortunately, X11 doesn’t seem to have fractional scaling support build-in, in fact I can’t even select different scaling for different screens leaving either my internal or external screens severely crippled
It seems there’s some workarounds available, I’ll look into those when I have the time
It also constantly messes up my display settings, but that’s a minor inconvenience
Still, does anyone know some simple fixes for these issues? Else I’ll probably end up with a separate dock for when I don’t need the gpu power and just want a nicely working system.
@Marro64 Have you tried simply disabling the iGPU to confirm the issue? By piping the display signal to an external display, the iGPU should be doing nothing at all unless the display on the laptop is also running. Actually, since you mentioned switching applications back to the laptop…that may be the issue. I imagine what is happening (not an expert, could be wrong) is that the signal is sent to be rendered by the eGPU, then it is sent back to iGPU to be sent to the integrated display and sent back out the eGPU to the external display.
Have you tried leaving the eGPU attached but the external display gets its signal from an HDMI/DP expansion card? If my theory is correct that might help things.
It’s my impression that Wayland + Nvidia = …you’re going to have a bad time, especially in a hybrid-GPU situation like you’re doing (which can be a bad time even on X11, though I believe it’s not quite as bad).
Really, I do believe this is one of those situations where an AMD GPU would have resulted in much less pain, but you said that you already had the GTX 1080 so that doesn’t really apply since that was back in the latter years of the pre-Ryzen days when AMD was still trying to find their footing after “faildozer”.