I am not sure whether this thread fits better in some other sub-forum - if it does, so move it please. As my question consists of several "sub-questions" I was not sure; anyway, I thought all-in-all this whole topic is definitely more related to hardware than to anything else...

Hi, I am a visual artist who is currently learning and switching to creating artwork digitally by using a Wacom graphic tablet. A few months ago, I built together a PC from second hand hardware components (before that I used notebooks for my whole life). This is what it looks like right now (the relevant parts):

All in all, everything (except SSD, input devices and display which all were bought new) is up to 10 years old...
I am running Debian Stable/Buster and almost everything is working smooth and fast. However, there are a few things that don't:

As the NVIDIA-GPU-monitoring-app I am using (qnsvm) is saying that practically no GTK-apps are using the GPU (f.e. MyPaint, Rawtherapee, InkScape do not at all; GIMP only in computing mode instead of graphical mode). Before switching to proprietary driver, with noveau it was even worse: GIMP didn't use the GPU at all.

It seems that as just mentioned my NVIDIA card refuses in most cases to work with GTK-apps while it works suspiciously well with Qt-apps (I use KDE as DE), even those that do not have to do with any graphics (for some reason even Electrum, a BTC-/LTC-wallet app, as well as some akonadi-processes appear in the qnsvm-list, all in graphical mode...I think I don't have to explain why this confuses me, do I? Krita and G'MIC (regardless if started as Krita's or GIMP's plugin) on the other hand are working and displayed (in qnsvm) as one would expect and do not let and questions left. Native 3D-games and even those that run under Wine work properly and tend to be displayed in qnsvm's list.


So my actual questions are:

1. Is this phenomenon of "choosyness" of NVIDIA cards a common known thing? I googled around here and there but could not find any preference of Nv. cards for Qt over GTK...
I assume there isn't any way to force any GUI app (regardless of which GUI libs it uses) to use the GPU, is there?..

2. The second question belongs in the first case to users who also work a lot with photo-editing and digital drawing/painting apps but have an AMD graphic card in their computers: Do you encounter similar problems or not at all? The thought of changing my current NVIDIA for a AMD graphic card with even less memory, as I barely work with 3D-graphics, isn't leaving my mind. My primary goal is have my dedicated GPU used regardless of whether a painting app is using GTK (MyPaint, which has even a slightly behind-pulling cursor when drawing on an empty single layer; GIMP in graphical mode, RawTherapee/DarkTables) or Qt (Krita) or with none of those (apps like Blender or Xaos).

3. If we forget for a moment about vector graphics I do not use often yet anyway (I have read they rely on a strong CPU and barely use GPU power) and focus ourselves on pure 2D/raster graphics, big canvas-/layer-resolutions - what hardware parts would you recommend me to replace at first (with maximum priority)? My budget won't be great enough to buy a whole middle-class graphics-editor machine within the next time respectively this year...and if the above mentioned issues wouldn't affect my digital work, I would be absolutely okay with the overall power of my current machine (maybe because I previously had only notebooks in my life to work with - with typical notebook-hardware and all the "fun" included by that...so I am really a bit modest haha)


I hope I didn't f--up too bad by putting these questions into one big thread instead of creating multiple threads in different sub-forums with having to explain the same problems and background - otherwise please tell me.

I'm excited to read your statements on these topics and questions - anyway, great thanks in advance for your time and your effort for help!

SevenChalices

No, there isn't any way to do that, but I suspect that the Nvidia monitoring app may be reporting only one type of use.

I own AMD graphics cards and write hobby programs that call GTK. 2D drawing is largely done on the CPU. The GPU does copies and fills. This results in nearly-instantaneous 2D drawing.

If 2D drawing is slow, check the Xorg.0.log to see that GPU hardware acceleration is enabled.

Slow drawing can result from a poorly-tuned application, but that is a problem for the programmer.

No problems. My AMD graphics cards work out-of-the-box on Linux.

That observation is true. A faster CPU will belp. Those applications tend to be multi-threaded, and so more cores will help. But you should upgrade only if your present computer is too slow.
Ed

1 members found this post helpful.

Agree with EdGr. It sounds like everything is working exactly as intended/expected here (the GPU is not a 'magic bullet' for any displayed content), and if you want/need more performance that's going to be CPU-bounded by a large degree (and the CPU you have is an oddball pairing with that big Quadro). Or, as EdGr says, could just be an issue with a specific program. You probably don't have much upward upgrade ability with that FM2 motherboard (there are some stupidly overpriced used 6000/7000-generation FM2 chips but they'll still all be dual-module 15h with no L3 cache like the 5600k - these are a fine 'office PC' chips but they're not workstation material). You'd need to consider an entirely new platform to see significant upgrade in performance, sorry to say. No idea on specific applications' preference for 'cores vs clockspeed' (and my own examination of this issue with various hardware leads to consistently inconsistent conclusions with real-world software).

Something else to note: nVidia is dropping support for Kepler in the coming months, which may lead to support issues for that K5000 going forward.

Also ditto on no issues with AMD cards - the open source drivers (be it radeon or amdgpu) are consistently good. You can try the AMD GPU on your 5600k if you'd like to play with it yourself - it is pre-GCN hardware and thus will only support the radeon driver (the biggest 'gotcha' for most people is no Vulkan support) but should be otherwise competent within its performance limits (again, these chips are great cheap and cheerful SoCs, but they were never speed demons).

Before shopping for a different GPU, you ought to evaluate your starting point. Remove the NVidia and see what your IGP can do. If it falls only modestly short of your needs, there are IGP upgrades to consider. I too have an FM2+ A8 CPU, but with significantly newer GCN IGP. The same CPU I have is available on ebay for as little as $22USD. There's another there for $22.50USD.

I'm not into graphics applications, but mine seems to work little differently from newer graphics hardware from both AMD and Intel.