Screen randomly lags when not doing anything or playing a game

[TNE]

@DragonSong

I’m running mainline right now as a test, but I have tried both zen and lts! Both of them also have the same problems unfortunately, the mainline kernel has just been another hopeful “hail mary”.

@DragonSong

I have also attempted both x11 and wayland! Both are giving the same problems.

Good to know. Let’s keep looking then.

@DragonSong

I was also asking a friend of mine for help and I think I had a journalctl exported from one of the lags, see if this is fine?

The logs don’t seem to be too much out of the ordinary. I can see all the logs from the system start all the way to you executing /usr/bin/true with sudo and the game being closed in between. Did the lag happen between the game start and game stop?

@DragonSong

Output of pacman -Qs nvidia !

This output also indicates that everything is configured correctly.

@DragonSong

Also I must have accidentally failed to copy garuda-health! I’m so sorry for not thinking about it, this might potentially be a problem but I didn’t think it was!

It’s nothing to worry about for now. You are probably missing the kernel headers linux-headers.

Let’s summarize:

• Your GPU usage jumps to 100% randomly
• When this happens, you are experiencing major lag
• This happens randomly while browsing, or reliably when a game is open, even when that game is running on the NVIDIA graphics card (but it also happens when not running on the NVIDIA graphics card?)
• The lag can be stopped by closing the game or firedragon (I’m assuming it can be stopped?)
• The issue is specific to your hardware, this does not happen on other installations of Garuda Linux
• The GPU usage spike is not visible on nvtop (?)
• Some steps were taken to detect the NVIDIA drivers, but you do not know what they are

My instincts here, just looking at the symptoms, tell me the system is starved for ram, but I think that’s unlikely because you have 32 gigabytes of memory available and the htop screenshot you just sent confirms this as well.

Your CPU is basically idle at the time of the lag.

@DragonSong

Here is my journalctl! I had to restart my computer because it was completely lagged out. I only had firedragon, vesktop opened actively

OH very interesting! There are many reports of a “GPU hang” happening, confirming my suspicions this is related to the intel graphics card and the NVIDIA graphics card was just a red herring. We can try to use a different driver and see if that will help:

Instructions:

Create a file at /etc/default/grub.d/intel-xe.cfg. The file content shall be the following:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="$GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT i915.force_probe=!7d67 xe.force_probe=7d67"

Now, execute sudo update-grub and reboot.

garuda-inxi should now confirm this is in effect:

...
parameters: BOOT_IMAGE=/@/boot/vmlinuz-linux-mainline
root=UUID=69010859-42b5-4d66-9530-0424b1b3a1ac rw rootflags=subvol=@
loglevel=3 quiet i915.force_probe=!7d67 xe.force_probe=7d67
...
Device-1: Intel Arrow Lake-S [Intel Graphics] vendor: Lenovo driver: xe
v: kernel alternate: i915 arch: Xe2-LPG process: TSMC n3 (3nm) built: 2025+
ports: active: eDP-2 empty: DP-2,DP-3 bus-ID: 00:02.0 chip-ID: 8086:7d67
class-ID: 0300

Please send the new garuda-inxi here and verify if the lags are still happening.