Quadro GPU on a P50 and Linux

[marttt]

Hi, and happy holidays!
We have a P50 with the Nvidia Quadro M2000M GPU. Currently we're running Windows 10, but thinking about switching to Linux. Since our son needs the Nvidia GPU for occasional gaming, my question is, how well does this eGPU work with Linux?

I've read forum threads elsewhere concluding that the Quadro seems to need Windows drivers to work flawlessly. Somebody even said that its performance under Linux is no better than that of the integrated graphics.

Thanks for sharing your experiences, and suggestions for a suitable Linux distro (regerding the Quadro GPU) are also warmly welcomed.

[axur-delmeria]

Never had a Thinkpad with nVidia graphics, but the proprietary drivers from nVidia will generally work well on Linux. A quick web search tells me the nvidia version 535.146.02 driver supports the Quadro M2000M: https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverR ... 728/en-us/

[marttt]

@axur-delmeria, thanks very much for this, very useful!

Apparently Pop!_OS also gets recommended for NVIDIA. In fact, they even seem to have a separate ISO specifically for NVIDIA GPUs on the downloads page. Usually I like to hand-tailor my own minimal Linux systems, but since the GPU needs to work, I'm possibly going to try Pop! and report back here as well.

[wavehead]

Hi there. I got a p50, nvidia quad 2000m. Been on opensuse 15.5 (now) with KDE for 4 years. Opensuse is German developed - so not bleeding edge, reliable, polished and stable. Opensuse has a commercial system that runs in major banks, Co-Op etc so is well maintained. I am running the graphics card from the latest nvidia-G05 driver from Nvidia. Nice and sharp and quick. Opensuse has YAST which is a graphical user interface to control all aspects including download of programs for video editing, games, etc etc or uninstall.

If you want to try Linux - I would suggest buying a M.2 spare and swapping it in for the windows one. You could try a live USB but they are meh - slow. That way if it all goes [censored] up or you dont like that linux flavour you can just stick Windows back in and not lost anything. Dual Boot can be done - but windows/linux quite often have fights in such systems.

There are good guides to get going. Opensuse install process is easy, download, create USB ISO, stick in chosen machine and follow the install process - no command line. drivers brought in fine for wifi etc. 20 mins up and running. The included Nouveau linux driver for Nvidia cards will just work with screen and external. To get sharper graphics performance (not really noticeable IMHO for production but is for games) you can install the Nivida G05 X11 driver - via linking to NVIDIA repo and then install via zypper in nvidia-x11-G05. Then do the multimedia codec install from pacman (a one click process via a FAQ). For the P50 with Nvidia driver I set in Bios to use discrete graphics card rather than hybrid as always plugged in (so don't need intel). Games - Xonitic a space fps is good. Other games on Steam work well if for Linux. However your son will probably be disappointed if using this exclusively for gaming - as linux games availability whilst made great strides are inferior to those on Microsoft. Great to replace productivity from windows to Linux though (all but CAD). Opensuse tbf I have used for 10 years plus now. Rock solid, never had a blue screen lock out system crash (like windows), have live updates and no shut down just keep working. It has a few quirks now and again when roll over to new version, where you MUST disable the Nvidia repo, and reinstall relevant driver via command line - 3 lines of code but that is the only PITA.

cheers... B

[marttt]

Thanks very much for this dedicated write-up, @wavehead! TBH I had not considered openSUSE -- in fact, dehe spite 10+ years of Linux experience with different distros, it has always somehow remained off my radar. For no particular reason, actually.

I'm finally getting the time to actually install a Linux on that P50 just these days. I was leaning towards CrunchBang++, which is a reincaranation of a great minimal Debian distro that I used and loved more than a decade ago. Your post got me really curious about openSUSE as well, so I will read up on it for sure.

Thanks again for sharing all these details of your experience, and the pointers!

UPDATE: Okay, I decided to give openSUSE Tumbleweed a go, with the default Nouveau driver. A question, though: how can I make sure that a particular application (e.g. Minetest game) is always using the NVIDIA eGPU and not the onboard graphics by Intel? Nouveau appears to be installed (shows up in 'lspci' and 'lshw'); does this mean that the system will switch over to it automatically for graphics-heavier tasks, and switch back to Intel for more idle stuff?

It does seem like an intriguing system, many thanks for bringing it up.

AFTER A FEW DAYS: I had issues with openSUSE install -- the system only booted with the installation USB plugged in. Without it, I had a flickering screen, but couldn't get to GRUB. This was surely a bootloader/MBR issue, but I didn't have time to fix it with some dedicated MBR fixing software. So after several unsuccessful openSUSE reinstalls (both Tumbleweed and Leap), I just gave up and went with Fedora 39.

From what I can tell (via those USB bootings), SUSE did come with Nouveau drivers preinstalled, and it seemed to work nicely. I also very much liked the SUSE desktop (I went with XFCE) and all those GUI config tools! It is a well-tailored system for sure; It felt very solid indeed. I would highly recommend it to anybody who is migrating from Windows, because the Applications menu and its search box give a really nice "much better and telemetry-free Windows" experience. So it was actually also a pity to leave.

As for Fedora, though, it may even suit better for the P50 than SUSE. I'm highly sensitive to fan noise, so I noticed that while in Fedora (where I'm typing this) the fan is completely inaudible most of the time, it still did turn off once in a while in openSUSE. It was still quiet though, not annoying, but comparing the two distros, there is some difference in favor of Fedora with default settings (and XFCE in both cases).

As for the GPU, it did take me some time to understand how to utilize it in Fedora 39. I choose to install the NVIDIA proprietary driver, but the installation and set-up was frictionless and actually not hard (had to create only '/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/nvidia.conf' by hand). The instructions at RPM Fusion are truly excellent: https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA

So currently I'm launching all my son's games (there's actually only two, Minetest and Minecraft via Prism Launcher) with a one-liner script that tells to use the NVIDIA GPU, as instructed here (this is also linked from the RPM Fusion howto): http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linu ... fload.html

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
__NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia minetest

This is really handy, well understandable and easy to control, as compared to Windows where I was actually never sure if the game is indeed using the eGPU or not. On Fedora, I check it with the 'nvtop' command.

Having been stuck to this Windows computer for the last year or so, I had already forgotten how much more enjoyable it is to be in Linux. Fedora seems really good, smooth and very well documented. Not too big, but also not as barebones or config-file/CLI-oriented like e.g. CrunchBangPlusPlus (which I still like and would possibly have preferred if it was only for my own use). Fedora looks like a great distro for the P50, at least after initial impressions of a couple of days.

Thanks again, though, @wavehead, for introducing me to openSUSE! I'm still definitely very positively intrigued by this system, and it's kind of a pity that it didn't work out with the bootloader. Since Fedora is working, I'm unlikely to try again in the near future, though, at least not on the P50.