I’ve been using an AMD 6700 XT for the past few years but have been considering getting a NVIDIA 5070 Ti for raytracing and lesser extent DLSS.
However, I’ve borrowed a NVIDIA 2060 and am having massive performance issues on the propriety drivers. I’m getting cursor stutters, window movements stuttery, Gnome overview stuttering, etc. Basically the desktop is not nearly as smooth as it is on AMD.
Even Nouveu is a better experience, although that means no Vulkan support unless I were to manually set up NVK.
Is the experience any better for 30 series or 40 series?
I’m currently dual booting Pop OS and Fedora KDE edition with a 3080, so essentially using both an old GNOME version (Pop) and Plasma 6 (Fedora). Pop works straight out of the box if you choose the Nvidia install and the Nvidia controls are fairly similar to Windows.
Fedora gave me some problems getting it going, but once I’d opted in to proprietary drivers, and did a few updates, it’s been all good. The HDR implementation in Plasma is way better than Win 10 and the only issue with VRR is that it won’t work if you have a multi-monitor setup. Turning off the other monitors works fine. The gpu controls are more limited though.
GNOME is a bit behind Plasma. VRR is an experimental feature and HDR doesn’t run on Nvidia cards. Both should be fixed sometime this year I believe.
If you undervolt your card you are out of luck. There are some limited overclocking tools but underclocking seems like a bit of a nightmare.
According to the Arch wiki covering VRR, Gnome doesn’t have issues with multi-monitor VRR, so you can set it for one monitor and not another in Display Settings (once you enable the feature; can’t test myself).
Sounds like both Plasma and Gnome have work ahead of them, since you said that you can’t currently have a multi-monitor setup using VRR on Plasma.
Huh TIL. Sorry if I sounded dismissive of GNOME, I was just going by what has and hasn’t been implemented. I actually hated how Plasma looked and how it was set out so ended up getting a global Mac OS theme to fix it.
Part of the reason for dual booting is to figure out which DE I prefer having only just moved over from windows.