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Here are the steps I took:

  • Disabled Secure Boot in BIOS
  • Installed Ubuntu 20.10 opting in to install third-party drivers
  • Once complete, ran sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall
  • After reboot, confirmed that:
    • nvidia-driver-460 (latest, recommended) was selected in Additional Drivers under Software & Updates
    • NVIDIA On-Demand was pre-selected in PRIME Profiles under nvidia-settings
  • Plugged in my external monitor and found that:
    • It was shown under Settings => Displays
    • It was not shown in nvidia-settings
    • The screen would flash HDMI No Signal as if it wasn't connected
    • dmesg reported [drm] Failed to add display topology, DTM TA is not initialized

The workaround I found was to switch to NVIDIA (Performance Mode) and reboot. Now the second screen works, except every 15-20 min the fans suddenly kick in (most of the time they are silent), and I can see high CPU usage either from gnome-shell or Xorg when running top. I'd then run Alt+F2 => r => Enter to quiet them down, but these fan spikes repeat regardless which is very distracting.

For now, I reverted to Using X.Org X server - Nouveau display driver and purged all *nvidia* packages. As a result, my graphics show as NV168 / AMD Renoir in the About section of Settings. I also get weird screen flickers when Ubuntu is booting that I otherwise didn't get with Nvidia drivers. Sometimes when I reboot or power off, Ubuntu would go into a black screen and display nouveau 0000:01:00.0: tmr: stalled at ffffffffffffffff messages.

My configuration and specs:

  • Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy (default gdm3 display manager)
  • 5.8.0-36-generic kernel
  • AMD Ryzen 7 4800H processor with Radeon graphics
  • Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti dedicated graphics card

Things I tried:

  • Reinstall Ubuntu with third-party drivers checkbox on
  • Reinstall Nvidia drivers from scratch
  • Use the latest Nvidia drivers as this answer from May suggests that external monitors are supported in offload mode as of nvidia-driver-450 and I have nvidia-driver-460 (460.32.03) installed
  • Enable experimental hw support in AMDgpu driver as suggested in this answer
  • Prefix ExecStartPre with /usr/bin/xinit as suggested here
  • Change options nvidia-drm modeset= from 1 to 0 as suggested here

Is there anything I'm missing here? Is it possible to make the external monitor work with Nvidia drivers in On-Demand Profile?

Probably related: this and this.

Alex
  • 224

1 Answers1

2

I ran into the same issue with my RTX 2060. I had already installed the latest Nvidia driver (nvidi-520), but it looks like the latest version of Nvidia drivers are causing several issues. I could solve this by downgrading it.

First, uninstall all Nvidia drivers on your computer:

sudo apt-get remove --purge '^nvidia-.*'

After that, you should install nvidia-driver-460-server. It seems to be the best one until now.

sudo apt install nvidia-driver-460-server

Now you should reboot, connect your monitor and it should work. If not, try to disable the secure boot on your computer.

Best of luck!

Nas
  • 31