XanMod-ing Ubuntu To Perform Closer To Intel's Clear Linux

[Vistaus]

I have a file called env.sh in /etc/profile.d. Scripts in this directory will run at startup.

Thanks!

[allquixotic]

Maybe you performance enthusiasts will know something about this...

I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 with the Xanmod'ed 5.4.12. KDE Plasma desktop with the OpenGL 3.x KWin compositor. Generally speaking, scrolling in windows like VS Code and Firefox is laggier than I'd like, but it's way worse when running a Vulkan game (for example, Elder Scrolls Online through Proton). The problem manifests on the official Ubuntu kernel for 19.10, the official kernel of 20.04, and the Xanmod kernel, but it's actually slightly better on Xanmod. Basically the FPS of windows other than my Vulkan application really tanks when it's running. This also occurs on Gnome3/Mutter.

Hardware: MSI GS65 Stealth-666 (Stealth-9SG)
Core i9-9880H
64 GB DDR4
2 x Samsung 970 EVO Plus
External monitor: Samsung CRG90 (5120x1440 @ 120Hz)
Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti in an eGPU, connected via Thunderbolt 3 and configured as my primary/only GPU using egpu-switcher. Nvidia PRIME profile is set to maximum performance.
ZFS root, lz4 compression, no encryption. SSDs are in ZFS' software RAID-0 (the default behavior of adding both SSDs to a zpool).

I have Firefox stable configured to enable WebRender, since it's far laggier without it. Chrome is also pretty bad, and Electron apps like the Discord desktop app are terrible; Firefox/WebRender is far better than Discord desktop at rendering Discord.

I'm just looking to prevent a Vulkan game from tanking the FPS of other windows / the compositor. Is this a Nvidia driver GPU scheduling issue that can't be fixed, or what do you suspect is the problem given my symptom?

[Buntolo]

Maybe you performance enthusiasts will know something about this...

I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 with the Xanmod'ed 5.4.12. KDE Plasma desktop with the OpenGL 3.x KWin compositor. Generally speaking, scrolling in windows like VS Code and Firefox is laggier than I'd like, but it's way worse when running a Vulkan game (for example, Elder Scrolls Online through Proton). The problem manifests on the official Ubuntu kernel for 19.10, the official kernel of 20.04, and the Xanmod kernel, but it's actually slightly better on Xanmod. Basically the FPS of windows other than my Vulkan application really tanks when it's running. This also occurs on Gnome3/Mutter.

Hardware: MSI GS65 Stealth-666 (Stealth-9SG)
Core i9-9880H
64 GB DDR4
2 x Samsung 970 EVO Plus
External monitor: Samsung CRG90 (5120x1440 @ 120Hz)
Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti in an eGPU, connected via Thunderbolt 3 and configured as my primary/only GPU using egpu-switcher. Nvidia PRIME profile is set to maximum performance.
ZFS root, lz4 compression, no encryption. SSDs are in ZFS' software RAID-0 (the default behavior of adding both SSDs to a zpool).

I have Firefox stable configured to enable WebRender, since it's far laggier without it. Chrome is also pretty bad, and Electron apps like the Discord desktop app are terrible; Firefox/WebRender is far better than Discord desktop at rendering Discord.

I'm just looking to prevent a Vulkan game from tanking the FPS of other windows / the compositor. Is this a Nvidia driver GPU scheduling issue that can't be fixed, or what do you suspect is the problem given my symptom?

There are so many things to check, I think it would be more appropriate to just open a thread. i.e.:
1) Are you using PRIME with nvidia or nouveau?
2) What works well? Not better than ugly, but well in absolute terms.
3) Are you sure PRIME is finely tuned and working correctly?
4) What happens if you run pure X without Wayland?
5) What happens if you use bumblebee (both with optirun and primusrun) instead of PRIME?
6) I don't understand this sentence "Basically the FPS of windows other than my Vulkan application really tanks when it's running". So does the Vulkan application work well in its window and just everything else suck?
7) This is unrelated, but I suggest against RAID 0.
8) I'd keep out of the equation any non native-software, like Electron based stuff (VS Code is based on it as well).
9) Chromium should still have experimental support for Vulkan, so I'd try to untick both Vulkan and Wayland out of the equation.

[allquixotic]

There are so many things to check, I think it would be more appropriate to just open a thread. i.e.:
1) Are you using PRIME with nvidia or nouveau?
2) What works well? Not better than ugly, but well in absolute terms.
3) Are you sure PRIME is finely tuned and working correctly?
4) What happens if you run pure X without Wayland?
5) What happens if you use bumblebee (both with optirun and primusrun) instead of PRIME?
6) I don't understand this sentence "Basically the FPS of windows other than my Vulkan application really tanks when it's running". So does the Vulkan application work well in its window and just everything else suck?
7) This is unrelated, but I suggest against RAID 0.
8) I'd keep out of the equation any non native-software, like Electron based stuff (VS Code is based on it as well).
9) Chromium should still have experimental support for Vulkan, so I'd try to untick both Vulkan and Wayland out of the equation.

1) PRIME with the nvidia binary. Nouveau isn't quite usable for my hardware (Turing).
2) Vulkan applications run incredibly smoothly with very high FPS. Under most circumstances Firefox with WebRender runs very smoothly as well, unless there's an active Vulkan application demanding a lot from the GPU.
3) I'm not sure how to finely tune PRIME. Can you elaborate?
4) I'm not running Wayland at all.
5) Is this supported with the nvidia binary driver and an eGPU? If so, how would I set that up to test it?
6) Your last sentence/question here is correct. The Vulkan application works well in its window and everything else sucks.
7) Fair enough. I keep backups of all important data, and I trust ZFS not to eat my data, so I'd need to have a hardware failure for it to be a problem.
8) OK, but those applications shouldn't have horrible scrolling performance, should they? Scrolling in those apps is implemented by the Chromium/Blink engine, not by JavaScript or anything. On Linux it should be using OpenGL by default. On Windows the scrolling performance of these Electron apps is not nearly as bad.
9) Wayland is already out of the equation. Chromium does not enable Vulkan unless you tell it to. I've tried forcing Vulkan enablement with Chrome Canary to see if it's ready, but it just crashes the renderer and falls back to software or OpenGL. I guess Chromium's Vulkan implementation is broken or doesn't work with the Nvidia binary driver.

I think it might help if I use an un-loaded GPU (like the Intel IGP) to render windows like Firefox, VS Code and Discord, so that the heavily utilized Nvidia GPU can just focus on running Vulkan apps. If I set the Nvidia profile to On Demand for PRIME, would it be possible to use the eGPU using environment variables? I can probably script up all my game launchers to pass in the env vars appropriately to run on the eGPU.