Fedora 44 and gt710 with noveau

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1

hello

i tried some months ago making work this old gt 710, it is a display adapter, last time i tried it was on kernel 6.5 or older, cant remember

back then, it caused problems with kde reporting constant crashes, i just removed the gpu back then

since i am now in fedora 44 and kernel 7.09 i tried again

no crashes so far, but for some reason it messed up wifi networks and forced me to put again the password

i have one problem, it makes pc feel slow, load pages slow, it feels like it was running at 30hz but monitor is still at 1080p 60hz

these are the specs of the machine

Operating System: Fedora Linux 44
KDE Plasma Version: 6.6.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.26.0
Qt Version: 6.11.1
Kernel Version: 7.0.9-205.fc44.x86_64 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 4 Ă— AMD Ryzen 3 2200G with Radeon Vega Graphics
Memory: 8 GiB of RAM (7.7 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor: NVK GK208B
Manufacturer: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
Product Name: A520I AC

it is using noveau drive, because nvidia does not support this gpu anymore under linux, so i didnt bothered testing any nvidia driver, so only noveau should be loaded, but reallu, youtube feels terribly slow, when compared to how it was running under the old vega 8 i have on this apu, it runs circles around it

i would like to make it work at least faster, not sure if noveau is good enough to render youtube these days in this old gpu, any help is appreciated

2

i should add that after i made the previous comment, i tried to test youtube, but clicking on another tab in firefox made the system stop responding, i couldnt do anything, i had to turn it off, i removed the gpu so i can use the system normally but would like to know if that gpu can be made to work

3

When using the nouveau driver there is no hardware acceleration available on the nvidia GPU. That means that all video must be processed by the CPU and seriously bogs down the system.

The GT710 is still supported by nvidia drivers, though the legacy (older) driver versions must be used. That particular card is supported by the 470xx driver available from rpmfusion, though that driver does not support wayland (it works with x11 only) and will not work with f44 KDE Plasma. If you were to upgrade to a GT 780 or newer card it would be supported with wayland using the 580xx driver, and if you were to upgrade to a 16xx series or newer card it would be supported by the latest 595 mainstream driver.

4

thank you for your reply, i do not have a newer gpu for this particular pc, it is a old display adapter i had doing nothing, i wanted to use it because i have very little ram on this pc and firefox has become a bit ram hungry recently and, with the ram prices, it will stay at 8 gbs of ram for some more years

the machine is a 4 cores cpu, i would imagine that if my old athlon 4 cores could handle 720p on cpu(a athlon 5150), this 710 could at least 1080p without dying on me

i imagine that the pc died because it couldnt do the 3d acceleration you mention noveau cant do and, i wont use old driver with old kernel, wayland is everywhere now

thank you for clarifying things for me

5

Have you tried just using the iGPU?

I used to have the 2400G (higher model in the same generation), and the iGPU was pretty decent - considerably better than Intel iGPUs of the same era. Watching YouTube on it was fine.

7

the cpu doesnt have a igpu, it has a apu

igpu is how intel calls their integrated gpus, to avoid confusion, or to make people think apus are bad or something

that apu is in use, vega 8

as i mentioned, i dont have much ram, just 8 gbs, that are split between 1 gb for the apu, 6.7gbs for the system

the idea was put the 710 to work that is a old fanless gpu with 1 gb of vram, instead of doing nothing in a box, get that 1 gb back from the apu and have a bit better experience usng the pc, because how youtube is running on firefox, i have seen it being closed to avoid ram problems or something like that, i cant even press the reload button on youtube, or the web browser becomes too slow and i have to close it, specially common when pc wakes up from suspension, this is not a linux problem, it also happens on windows, but takes longer, days, so i imagine it is a ram issue on linux, the firefox port is not as good as i would like to

the apu runs circles around the 710 for sure, but i wanted to have free that ram

that is why i asked for the noveau question on the 710

8

You could set the APU to use as little RAM as possible in most BIOS.

It will then dynamically use RAM when it’s dedicated RAM is full.

9

well, this apu can use as little as 512mbs of ram, so i set it to 1 gb to avoid having problems watching videos at 1080p, i have not tested with less than 1 gb so no idea if it will work well or not for what i want to do

back when intel used the dynamic memory allocation i saw the weirdest errors on most tools and programs i used, so i would not do it, a static amount is better in my opinion

in the end, the spirit of the post was know the gt710 status on fedora 44 and it is not good on noveau drivers for what i want to do

10

Just for reference, this is not accurate - nouveau does have hardware acceleration. Heck, you even get Vulkan support. https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/

The extreme lag here is just a bug. Could be a bug in KDE, or in nouveau…

@noname19 As a quick test to eliminate KDE as the potential root cause, I would boot the F44 Workstation live USB just to see if you get the same issue there. I’d also try disabling the AMD iGPU in the BIOS just to see if the bug might be triggered due to having two GPUs running at the same time.

11

thank you for your reply, yes, bios was configured to only have the 710 working, so i could have the ram to my disposal

i will test that tomorrow, will report back

12

You can also see if putting the card manually in performance mode fixes the issue, as they don’t have automatic relocking, only manual.

13

I have been running linux for years on an iMac 14,2 with:

Graphics:
  Device-1: NVIDIA GK107M [GeForce GT 755M Mac Edition] vendor: Apple
    driver: nouveau v: kernel arch: Kepler-2 pcie: speed: 2.5 GT/s lanes: 16
    ports: active: DP-1 empty: DP-2,DP-3 bus-ID: 01:00.0 chip-ID: 10de:0fea

Youtube videos have always worked well for me, but I have been using firmware files, initially by copying them from macOS, but more recently following instructions from Nvidia Acceleration.

Without the extra firmware files, firmware loads were failing and the journal had details, ending with:

kernel: nouveau 0000:01:00.0: msvld: unable to load firmware data

I recently did a fresh install of LXQt and did not see firmware load failures until running: dnf5 install x264 --allowerasing, after which the firmware load failures reappeared, so I again copied the missing files to /usr/lib/firmware/nouveau.

Edit: my system also has 8GB ram.

14

I have a similar old Nvidia GPU on my old system that doesn’t support Wayland. So my solution on that system was to switch to a DE that still allows use of X11. So I switched from Gnome to Cinnamon on this system. This hopefully will buy me some time where I can keep using the Nvidia. When/if all the DEs require Wayland I’ll probably just switch to the iGPU which should be fine for the little I do on this system anymore. This might be an option you could consider as well.

15

I think he means power management

  1. Ada Lovelace (RTX 40-series and newer): Features basic power management enabled by default.
  2. Turing & Ampere (RTX 20-series, RTX 30-series, and GTX 16-series): Power management and GSP (GPU System Processor) features are supported natively if you enable the nouveau.config=NvGspRm=1 kernel parameter.
  3. Maxwell & Pascal (GTX 750, 900-series, and 10-series): Reclocking is largely unavailable. The driver cannot change clock speeds automatically or manually, meaning these cards are often stuck idling and perform poorly.
  4. Kepler and older (GTX 600-series and earlier): Supports manual “reclocking” to adjust core and memory frequencies for better performance.
16

Right - I forgot this was also a thing. Would def try reclocking it.

But now that I think about it, I’m not sure if using a 1 GB GPU is even a good idea to begin with. I have nothing but a few Firefox tabs open currently and my GPU VRAM usage is at almost 1 GB. And unlike Windows, Linux doesn’t handle VRAM pressure well, especially on NVIDIA. Might just be more trouble than it’s worth.

17

ok, i didnt had a liveusb with that version, only the one with kde, i still tried, it freezes before showing the desktop, solid freeze, just shows cursor and kde logo

i dont see the point of downloading another iso, i wont use that iso, aprt from testing if it dislikes this gpu

about the power options, i dont see how those options could help with 3d rendering on this gpu, i think i will leave the gpu in a box and forget i have it

if nvidia decided to ignore it, i should do the same, it is after all, just a gt 710

18

Yes, that was the idea. Just to test it for science. Other people with Kepler GPUs have also had issues with the open source driver, like the GTX 680 mentioned here: Black Screen on F44 Live USB with old Nvidia
To clarify, did you test the Fedora 44 KDE ISO, or some older version? If you don’t mind, it would be interesting to know how F44 Workstation behaves.

It can help because by default, your GPU is running at idle/powersave clocks all the time, so performance is going to be much lower than expected.

But realistically, yes, the box is probably the best place for it.

19

about the iso, yes, that is how i installed fedora 44, i dont like to fool around anymore because this machine is my daily driver, so no more tests removing or adding gpus, messing with bios

about the power settings, the gt710 is a power saving gpu, iirc it uses like 20 watts, on powersaving it is deisred to make it run at like 10 watts or less, i dont think it needs more than that to render a page on screen, should be the same for videos

if i set it to maximum power usage, the machine will use more power than it should, just to render a page or show a youtube video, the pc already uses more power than i would like it to use with the apu, one of the golas i have with it is be efficient, other is be silent

i guess eventually i will move to a pi5 or something like that

20

I prefer < 10w

leigh@leigh-pc:~$ nvidia-smi
Sun May 24 13:13:10 2026       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 595.71.05              Driver Version: 595.71.05      CUDA Version: 13.2     |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                 Persistence-M | Bus-Id          Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |           Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                         |                        |               MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050        Off |   00000000:01:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
|  0%   42C    P8              5W /   70W |     212MiB /   6144MiB |     22%      Default |
|                                         |                        |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
21

yes, those numbers are nice, if you cant run youtube at 1080p, well, it is useless to me for sure