Nvidia on X11 sucks... kinda. It's very finicky to work with but if you get a working config, it
should stay fine (hopefully). A very common issue is after using nvidia-xconfig, your X11 config
will turn into a ticking timebomb that will unexpectedly break for seemingly no reason. You might
find yourself one day with an extremely slow system that doesn't seem to be as blazing fast as
before. You kill picom or whatever your compositor is and the issue is suddenly fixed! There are
a few steps you can take to try and debug this issue, but it is still generally just a pain to get
working again.
Kill your compositor and open a terminal or switch to a TTY (using ctrl+alt+f{number}) so you can
run some commands. Run glxinfo | grep OpenGl. You might need to install glxinfo to run that
command. If it outputs something like OpenGL vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation or OpenGL renderer string: GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER/PCIe/SSE2, then your problem is not with the GPU or
drivers (at least as it relates to this guide). If theres something about Mesa or SGI, then
you're using CPU rendering which is why your performance is so bad.
You'll want to install the Dynamic Kernel Module Support package for your NVIDIA
driver. On arch based distros, this can be done by doing sudo pacman -S nvidia-dkms. Other distros
will have a similar process. What this does is install a package that can replace the binary blob
in your kernel to always match your current driver version so that there aren't any kernel/driver incompatibilities.
- First cd into
/etc/X11. If you runlsyou'll see a few files and folders. - Make a backup of
xorg.confandxorg.conf.dby runningcp xorg.conf xorg.conf.old; mv xorg.conf.d xorg.conf.d.old. - Open up
xorg.confand remove everything that isn't necessary. My xorg.conf has been linked to use as an example. My monitor runs at 144hz so you might need to do something different in theSection "Screen"area.