Optimus manager in hybrid mode and OpenGL issues

Support
1

With the arrival of the NVIDIA 450 drivers, and specially with 455 (when it all started working properly), I’ve been finally able to use my laptop (Intel HD 630 and GTX 1050Ti, and running on 5.8 kernel) in hybrid mode with my external monitor. That said, I kept having issues with my system while using it. When just having the desktop on screen everything felt smooth as butter, but as soon as I had any programs on screen it always felt like my 60Hz monitor was capped at half the refresh rate. Everything felt laggy on the external monitor, while on the laptop one it all felt smooth. After looking for what could be the issue, I found out that changing the compositor from OpenGL (both versions have this issue) to XRender solved it, but with that I basically lost some of my desktop decorations (specially blur effects). Even kwin-lowlatency didn’t manage to help with it.

For the more experienced folks, is there any way to go back to OpenGL compositing and still have a smooth desktop experience with my setup or do I just keep Xrender and I was even dumb to try using OpenGL with hybrid mode?

2

XRandR is the resize and rotate extension of X11, I’m not sure what “changing the compositor to XRandR” means.

3

Oh crap, it’s Xrender, not Xrandr, got confused with the names, fixed it already

4

The lag ocurred on the external display? thats a know bug and nvidia is currently working on it since 450,if you output to external display only everything is cap at 1 FPS.

My workaround is to set mirrored mode and low the brightness in the internal display to even turn of the internal display,that way you can mimic like external display only.

Edit: You can also go to nvidia mode and use the external display only,the issue is not present when you go to nvidia mode.

5

That’s not the problem, although I had that issue with Pop_OS before switching to Manjaro.

What I have is a really laggy desktop experience (with hybrid mode on Optimus manager) when using OpenGL, but working fine when using Xrender. Like, even moving the cursor is laggy when it happens, like I’m using a 10 year old laptop, not a 3 y.o one.

Weirdly I’m still unable to replicate it 100% of the time, sometimes OpenGL works fine, and sometimes it’s near unusable. For now I just decided to keep using Xrender but I’m still confused to what might be causing this issue.