Tag: NVIDIA

Giving Up

I’ve really been struggling with my Fedora/NVIDIA setup. Not to long ago, I swapped over to the KDE Plasma spin of Fedora, and everything has been fine EXCEPT Cities: Skylines absolutely refuses to run on the NVIDIA card. Other games seem to do fine: the Intel UHD GPU will hand off more complex stuff off to the NVIDIA card. But for some reason, it just won’t hand off anything to the NVIDIA GPU. I tried a number of things … among them trying to launch Cities with switcherooctl and using the -adapter flag when launching Cities.

Instead of trying to spend more time figuring out what’s wrong, I decided to just set the primary GPU to the NVIDIA card using the directions here: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/how-to-set-nvidia-as-primary-gpu-on-optimus-based-laptops/

And it worked! Cities: Skylines is now running on the NVIDIA GPU … because it has too! Still not as beautiful as is looked under Windows, but a lot better than runing on the Intel GPU.

It kinda sucks, because having the NVIDIA card set to the primary GPU drains the battery and heats up the laptop, but since I rarely use my laptop off the AC Adapter, I guess it doesn’t really matter. Since it looks like this only works in an X11, I guess if I need to save power, I can login to a Wayland session. Or maybe manually set the NVIDIA card to a lower state.

Fedora, NVIDIA, and Parkitect

It seems like a lot of people have had trouble with Parkitect running in Linux on NVIDIA cards, myself included. For me, even with nearly empty parks I would have tearing of images when using WASD to move about the map and things in motion, like park patrons or attractions, would do a weird stutter, almost like they were vibrating. I was going to try and record some video of this happening, but for some reason I can’t recreate the problem with OBS Studio Recording. Weird.

A lot of people have tried a lot of things that worked for them, but none of that worked for me. Strangely, the thing that did work for me was turning off V-Sync and running in Windowed mode. I’m not exactly sure why this works, but it does. The stuttering and weird tearing is gone! You should be able to run in Vulkan or OpenGL. I haven’t really tested, but I think the graphics may look a little better in OpenGL, but that may be my imagination.

So if you’re having problems with Parkitect in Fedora or another Linux box with an NVIDIA card, try running it in Windowed mode with V-Sync off.