Help getting Nvidia GeForce MX450 working properly

DarkMoon74

Hi all,

I've bought myself a new laptop (Dell Latitude 5520) with an 11th Gen i7, 16 GB RAM, and a Nvidia GeForce MX450 that I'm trying to get working properly with SLiM and FVWM.

I can boot to a logon screen, login and get FVWM, and the Xorg log seems to say it's loading the NVIDIA driver (see Xorg.0.log linked below).

If I attach my USB-C dock with two external monitors and try booting that way, I get a black backlit laptop screen, and nothing on the monitors (status light shows orange (no signal)). If I detach the USB-C dock and restart display-manager, I get SLiM fine. I can then attach the USB-C dock and use xrandr after login to set up the two displays, then restart FVWM so it sees the new layout, and the three screens work fine.

Also, when I run Minecraft and check the F3 output, it tells me it's using MESA Intel Iris Xe, not Nvidia, and I'm getting down to 15 FPS at times on a relatively new vanilla world.

What's the proper setup for this? Should I be following the Intel or Nvidia driver guides, or both? What about Optimus? Is the xorg.conf required, or should I expect to get it working without one?

I've linked some info that I think may be helpful; let me know if more is needed. I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction to get this working better.

lscpu : https://pastebin.com/KTaL9kkg
lspci -knn : https://pastebin.com/3fJZYN7j
Kernel config : https://pastebin.com/WHtSumN0
dmesg : https://pastebin.com/6F8JCJrU
Xorg.0.log : https://pastebin.com/U2UH8rz1
lsmod : https://pastebin.com/9h4LELE0
emerge --info : https://pastebin.com/0UifWAqD

DaggyStyle · Watchman Joined: 22 Mar 2006 Posts: 5909

I have a thinkpad with NVIDIA on it running ubuntu 20.04, it's a pain because you have two gpus.
try setting the PRIME profile in NVIDIA-settinsg to ondemand or performance.

you can use optirun to define which gpu you will use when running minecraft.

what I found useful for me and my co workers with that is to disable one of the gpus
_________________
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the former - Albert Einstein

DarkMoon74 · Posted: Thu Sep 16, 2021 10:48 am Post subject:

Thanks DaggyStyle, that thought had occurred to me; it turns out it's really difficult to find a computer these days without integrated graphics, I wanted a basic discrete GPU for basic gaming (Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Terraria), and I wound up getting this one as a compromise at 40% off for EOFY. Although if I understand correctly, things are shifting in the other direction, and Intel are starting to make CPUs without GPUs? Seems so much simpler when I built my first computer in 1995...

Would disabling the Intel GPU be something I'd do in BIOS, or is it done via kernel / Xorg / portage config?

And "optirun" sounds a lot like "optifine", but it doesn't appear to be a Minecraft mod. :-P

Do I install that as part of x11-misc/bumblebee? That's being blocked by steam-client-meta from steam-overlay. :-S I also haven't set up Optimus yet; will it still work? And I was presuming that if I'm using the proprietary Nvidia drivers, I'd need to use the proprietary Optimus, but perhaps they're not tied together?

Time for more research....

DaggyStyle · Watchman Joined: 22 Mar 2006 Posts: 5909

it's a bios feature. try looking for it.
for me it was harder to get the bios passwd from IT than to find and disable it in the bios.

btw, if you set nvidia-settings PRIME profile to performance, it will use mostly you nvidia gpu while keeping the other one in case you want to use it in a multiseat setup or something like that
_________________
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the former - Albert Einstein

DarkMoon74 · Posted: Sat Sep 18, 2021 11:27 am Post subject:

Near as I can work out, disabling in BIOS isn't an option for me. But I've emerged prime-run, and using that, Minecraft now reports using Nvidia rather than MESA Intel, as does glxinfo. Basically, with my setup, I have VIDEO_CARDS set to i965, intel, iris, and nvidia, added nvidia to USE, and that seems to be the extent of the config needed.

Hopefully, before long the documentation (both in Gentoo and elsewhere) will catch up and iGPU/dGPU, Bumblebee/Optimus, and PRIME will be easier to figure out, but for now, this appears to be working for me. The only current documentation I could find was Nvidia's driver documentation, but I wasn't able to follow it and get it working; I presume it would have made switching between the two GPUs automatic, but I'll have to live with using prime-run when needed.

Thanks for the info, DaggyStyle.

DaggyStyle · Watchman Joined: 22 Mar 2006 Posts: 5909

DarkMoon74 · Posted: Sat Sep 18, 2021 9:36 pm Post subject:

I don't have any PRIME settings in my nvidia-settings; do you mean PowerMizer? That's the only thing I can find with Performance as a setting.

https://imgur.com/a/s9rgJ70

DaggyStyle · Watchman Joined: 22 Mar 2006 Posts: 5909

maybe this will help: https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/460.27.04/README/primerenderoffload.html
_________________
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the former - Albert Einstein

DarkMoon74 · Posted: Mon Sep 20, 2021 6:14 am Post subject:

Oh, that appears to be what I'm using; prime-run seems to just be a shortcut script that sets those variables and runs the command specified. :-)

segmentation-fault · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 11 Oct 2016 Posts: 99