GPU performance
 

Hi,
Since very beginning as I installed kubuntu I have problem with youtube fhd 60fps stuttering. Last time I installed nvidia drivers using ubuntu-drivers autoinstall command. Now when I use performance setting youtube works very good, but battery is draining extremely fast. After switching to on demand or powersaveing mode battery is fine, but youtube videos are freezing as before.

How to deal with that? How to force system to use gpu only when it is really need? Truly believe this is possible because on debian distro everything was working fine out of the box without any additional configuration from user side.

Plug your laptop into the wall :) . At home all my laptops are on the wire. Even traveling, my laptop will normally be plugged in (hotel room, or where-ever). I guess for those times you aren't in range of a socket you could just put up with a smaller area on the screen and not go FHD or not watch video :) . Don't know of a software setting to do either or.

Is the laptop a dual GPU laptop? What GPU is it? What CPU is in the laptop? What quality of video are you getting from youtube?

If you just have to change the power governor, why not just create a simple script to handle that for you? The Linux Kernel, it's drivers, and the whole OS, have no idea what you're doing in Firefox. So they have no idea when to change the power governor.

That being said, I think that there is more going on here than just a power governor problem. But I need to know more about the system first.

Cpu i7-4710HQ and gpu geforce 860m. Switching gpu mode requires system reboot. I have problems with 1080p60 youtube videos.

Fun fact is it sometimes works fine only on integrated gpu itself. I was thinking it depends on battery charge level, but it is not. Sometimes youtube plays well on low battery without dc plugged in, sometimes it stuttering on fully charged battery and plugged power adapter. Also it not depends on temperature. I was observing it for months, but couldn't find anything specific, totally random.

You mentioned that you used nvidia drives before, are you using the nvidia proprietary drivers now?

You mentioned that this problem did not happen before, can you describe the system that you were using before? How is it different from the current system?

To fix this, the easiest way is to figure out what thing in the new system is different and is causing this problem.

I'm using open drivers installed via ubuntu-drivers autoinstall command, before i had no gpu drivers installed at all. Previously i was using debian 10 and 11, also on windows it was fine. On debian there were no gpu drivers installed either. Right now I have kubuntu 22.04 lts and this problem occurs from the very beginning.


It would be perfect if there was no need to use gpu at all to run youtube, but I think it may be easier to workaround this issue with it.

Okay. Install Debian 10 onto a USB thumb drive. This will take a while to install, so you may want to grab a coffee or something while you're waiting.
Then boot the Debian 10 system and verify that youtube videos play without issue.

Now you should have 2 systems, one that we know works, and one that we know doesn't work properly. If that is true, then on each system run:
post the results of this command line here. They will be in the file "tmp.txt" on each system. Don't forget to tell us which set of results belong to which system.

This will tell us which kernels and GPU drivers each system is running.

Also, do both systems use Xorg? Or does one use Xorg and one wayland? Or do both use wayland?
If you don't know, you can find out by running, on each system:

Outputs in attachment, both are xorg. Before making output I run youtube and both were working properly.

It means - at least for me - your video drivers are not installed properly. Or probably you have a codec related issue. Your host runs some kind of software emulation instead of using your real hardware, the capabilities of your gpu.

No Gnu/Linux system with sufficiently old (somewhere in the 6-12 months older than the distro and kernel range) but non-ancient AMD, Intel or NVidia GPUs who has working X ever has no graphics drivers installed. The installer by default always and necessarily installs a default set of FOSS graphics drivers based upon any identifiable GPUs found. However, when two GPUs are present, the installer may not do so well in determining which drivers to install. Typically, special software and/or drivers are required in these situations that the installer won't do at all or won't get right, and the admin must put in some post-installation effort. Intel + NVidia generically speaking means Optimus, and typically implies Prime, depending on distro naming. This primer may help understand.