Nvidia, Prime and Wayland

Ask Fedora
, , ,
1

I’m getting a new computer with an AMD iGPU and keeping my old NVIDIA 1060 GPU. And I would really like to use wayland with that.

Can I get a better Nvidia+Wayland experience by using prime and connecting the display to an AMD iGPU? I saw that in the last year Nvidia Prime and the driver in general had some improvements, do they make it feasible?
Is there a different setup for a better experience?
Also, I plan on using KDE. Is there any caviat I should know about.

If yes, can you link some resources on how to set it up in a sensible way?

2

What AMD iGPU do you have?

If it new then it may well have far higher performance the the old 1060.
In which case it may not be worth the trouble of using the 1060.

Given the AMD GPU drivers are all open source its easier to use them.

3

It’s the one in the ryzen 7700x (I don’t have it yet, I just ordered it).

The 1060 is definitely not a powerhouse, but there’s no way it’s weaker than an iGPU. Unless it’s a particular soc with some special very powerful GPU

4

Note that a desktop mobo is not really an optimus or prime board. Your info about a new computer and keeping the nvidia GPU implies this is a desktop.

AFAIK wayland works well with the newer nvidia drivers when installed from rpmfusion.

I will note that it seems the cuda driver version 12.3 provided with the 545 driver does not seem to function with my nvidia 1050 GPUs. For that machine I keep it at the 535 driver with cuda 12.2 and it works well. My other system with a 3050 GPU uses cuda 12.3 and the 545 driver with no problems.

5

You are correct, this is a desktop. If possible, in this case prime would work transferring buffers from dGPU to iGPU via PCIE or whatever, which would introduce some little latency but It shouldn’t be that bad, I think.

Laptop without muxers have worked like that in the past, even some windows laptop branded with NVIDIA optimus (not anymore though).

If you say that modern drivers work well with wayland then I’ll try to get those working, thanks.