Very bad performance in Kubuntu 18.04 with Nvidia 1050 mobile

[ppraisethesun]

Hello, everyone! Not sure where i should post it, so I'll post it here ; )

I have very bad performance with nvidia drivers both in kubuntu 16.04 and 18.04.
Gnome 16.04 seems to run kind of ok, but not perfect and i don't like gnome.
My laptop specs are: HP Pavilion Power 15-cb011ur

• Core i7 7700HQ
  
• GeForce GTX 1050 mobile
  

When i go into try ubuntu option from usb, the system runs fine and smoothly.
However, after installing and rebooting into system, first i was greeted with a black screen. So i went into recovery mode and installed nvidia-390 drivers.
And after actually booting into gui it runs very poorly. The worst thing is moving and resizing windows. The mouse does not move smoothly, i just disappears from one place and appears couple dozen pixels away.

I checked the hashsums of downloaded isos and they are ok.
Any help is appreciated!

[claydoh]

How exactly or specifically what steps did you use to install the drivers? Did you reboot, or go directly from the recovery console to the desktop? I find that using the command line does not always do all the little steps to get everything installed and set properly. If you haven't actually rebooted, try that first to make sure all the newly installed kernel modules get loaded. You can open Nvidia Settings and see if there are lots of info/settings present, or only a few, which indicates the Nvidia driver is not loaded.


Next, go into system settings and see if the screen resolution is set correctly at 1920 x 1080.
Then I suggest going into the Driver Manager in System Settings and see if it shows the 390 driver being selected. If not, select it and apply, then reboot.

After that, we'll need to dig a little, though I will be asleep by then, probably If you have dual graphics, you may want to try disabling the Intel chip in the bios, or use it instead of Nvidia for the moment.


I also have a GTX 1050 in my older desktop PC, and it runs excellently (and cost more than the used computer did, lol)

The black screen (with cursor) indicates that Plasmashell likely crashed, but it is super easy to restart. When you get a black screen, hit alt-space to bring up krunner, and enter plasmashell and it should start right up.

[ppraisethesun]

How exactly or specifically what steps did you use to install the drivers? Did you reboot, or go directly from the recovery console to the desktop? I find that using the command line does not always do all the little steps to get everything installed and set properly. If you haven't actually rebooted, try that first to make sure all the newly installed kernel modules get loaded. You can open Nvidia Settings and see if there are lots of info/settings present, or only a few, which indicates the Nvidia driver is not loaded.

Next, go into system settings and see if the screen resolution is set correctly at 1920 x 1080.
Then I suggest going into the Driver Manager in System Settings and see if it shows the 390 driver being selected. If not, select it and apply, then reboot.

After that, we'll need to dig a little, though I will be asleep by then, probably If you have dual graphics, you may want to try disabling the Intel chip in the bios, or use it instead of Nvidia for the moment.

I also have a GTX 1050 in my older desktop PC, and it runs excellently (and cost more than the used computer did, lol)

The black screen (with cursor) indicates that Plasmashell likely crashed, but it is super easy to restart. When you get a black screen, hit alt-space to bring up krunner, and enter plasmashell and it should start right up.

I selected resume (or something like that. It was the first option) and installed driver just like you said: Went to settings - Driver Manager - selected Using nvidia...390... -> apply.
When i go there again, the Nvidia driver is selected, so i guess it is installed.
Nvidia settings shows following options and groups:

• X Server Information
• X Server Display configuration
• X Screen 0
• GPU 0 - (GeForce GTX 1050)
• PRIME profiles (NVIDIA is selected)
• Application profiles
• nvidia-settings configuration

I went into BIOS, but i could not find anything related to disabling the intel graphics.

Also the black screen was kind of weird. I couldn't go into terminal by pressing Alt + Ctrl + F1 or F2. The only way i could boot into GUI is from recovery menu.

[ppraisethesun]

Also i enabled Show FPS in desktop effects and it shows shows 60 or more fps, but it definitely does not feel that way

[GreyGeek]

Are you able to see something like this when you display the NVIDA configuration screen?

[ppraisethesun]

Yes, exactly the same

[ppraisethesun]

I tried installing Kubuntu 14.04 and it works a lot better.
Then I made a dist upgrade to 16.04 and it still works so much better that clean installation.
I am not sure what causes this, but I will try to upgrade to 18.04 and post bakc here for anyone interested.

[GreyGeek]

I tried installing Kubuntu 14.04 and it works a lot better.
Then I made a dist upgrade to 16.04 and it still works so much better that clean installation.
I am not sure what causes this, but I will try to upgrade to 18.04 and post bakc here for anyone interested.

Upgrades, in my experience & opinion, do not work out well for most. That is especially true for upgrades to 18.04 from 16.04, as has been reported on this forum and elsewhere.

However, if it works for you then more power to you. If it doesn't you can always download a FRESH ISO file, checksum it, burn it with verification (Etcher) and then try a fresh install.

[ppraisethesun]

Upgrade 16/04 -> 18.04 made things worse, so i guess i will stick with 14.04 -> 16.04. I'm not sure why it makes difference though. I checked all checksums before making bootable usbs.

[claydoh]

Have you tried using just the Intel GPU at all, or (if you can) disabling it in the bios? It does seem that some dual graphics laptops are just plain finicky. IMO, I would rather use the Intel GPU than use an Nvidia GPU with the stock, open source Nouveau driver, though it usually works OK. The Intel will be more performant than the Nvidia/Nouveau combo, even though the hardware is much better.

If you go with the proprietary driver down the road, I might suggest adding the ubuntu driver ppa to get the 397 beta, but only if the 390 ever performs properly for you. If you game on Steam at all, it does make a fair bit of difference for me on the more modern games, such as Tomb Raider.

[ppraisethesun]

A quick update on this weird topic.
I decided to completely clear all my ssd, remove windows and install kubuntu 16.04 and it worked nice, except some opengl artifacts.
However, as soon as i did apt upgrade, it became all laggy again. So, I guess, I will have to upgrade only stuff that i need manually for now.
If you know which package could cause my problem, feel free to reply

Here's an output of sudo apt list --upgradable: https://gist.github.com/ppraisethesun/a9778700b2157f253a434e0bb2eaa5bc

P.S. I am using nvidia drivers

[GreyGeek]

Open the KDE system monitor and on the process tab click the cpu header so that the apps using the most cpu percentage is at the top.

That should tell you what process is using the most cpu cycles.

If you have some warning or error condition taking place the system or kernel logs will tell you.

And, your ssd will slow down on rewrites. Using "sudo fstrim -v /" will help even on EXT4 fs.

Also, why downgrade to 16.04? Bionic is pretty good. If it gives you lag why not solve it on 18.04, unless no NVidia driver works for you.

[claydoh]

However, as soon as i did apt upgrade, it became all laggy again.

Use apt full-upgrade, else you won't get all updates available. This could possibly explain some of the problems

Also, the Nvidia driver in 16.04 (384, I believe) is older than your gpu, unless you have added the ubuntu-drivers ppa to get the 390 or the newer beta driver. This could also be a cause.


Unfortunately, sometimes Nvidia cards, drivers, and configs are a bit of a dark art it seems, though I personally haven't had issues with them that were not self-inflicted

[ppraisethesun]

Open the KDE system monitor and on the process tab click the cpu header so that the apps using the most cpu percentage is at the top.

That should tell you what process is using the most cpu cycles.

If you have some warning or error condition taking place the system or kernel logs will tell you.

And, your ssd will slow down on rewrites. Using "sudo fstrim -v /" will help even on EXT4 fs.

Also, why downgrade to 16.04? Bionic is pretty good. If it gives you lag why not solve it on 18.04, unless no NVidia driver works for you.

I agree, bionic is quite good and I use it on my PC with AMD gpu and it works fine. However, on my nvidia laptop it is laggy out of the box.
CPU doesn't get much load and the FPS counter which is available in desktop effects shows around 60-ish.
I reinstalled system too many times lately and so far i found the only thing that breaks it is the upgrade. To be more precise, some of security upgrades, which I installed with unattended-upgrade.
For now, I don't really have to install these >100 packages one by one to find out which of them causes the issue.

[GreyGeek]

What does:
cat /var/log/gpu-manager.log
show?

And:
https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comm..._lag_problems/

And:
https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/s...update.243990/