I have a Asus laptop, TUF566IV, running Kubuntu 23.04.
It comes with a RTX 2060 and an integrated AMD gpu.
I initially had a single HDMI external monitor and the display was handled by the iGPU, using the RTX only for machine learning.
I added another monitor, which is plugged into the USB-C port (displayport compatible), so now I'm using all 3 displays : 2 external monitors and the laptop screen.
I apparently cannot make the USB-C monitor work unless the RTX handles the display, which causes the GPU to be constantly used (1% to 25% as per nvidia-smi), the fan constantly blowing more or less loudly, and more annoyingly, frequent crashes of kde/plasmashell which kill several applications like the browser, pycharm.
The Xorg process also constantly uses up about 7% of the CPU.
For reference, here is my current xorg.conf (I tested quite a bit of variations and this one works, i.e. all 3 monitors are active):
Identifier "Device0"
Driver "amdgpu"
VendorName "amd"
BusID "PCI:5:0:0"
Option "UseNvKmsCompositionPipeline" "false"
EndSection
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Layout0"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
Option "Xinerama" "0"
EndSection
Section "Files"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
# generated from default
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "auto"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
# generated from default
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Unknown"
ModelName "Unknown"
Option "DPMS"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor1"
VendorName "Unknown"
ModelName "Unknown"
Option "DPMS"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor2"
VendorName "Unknown"
ModelName "Unknown"
Option "DPMS"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "Device1"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Device1"
Monitor "Monitor0"
Option "UseNvKmsCompositionPipeline" "false"
Option "ForceCompositionPipeline" "1"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen1"
Device "Device1"
Monitor "Monitor1"
Option "UseNvKmsCompositionPipeline" "false"
Option "ForceCompositionPipeline" "1"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen2"
Device "Device1"
Monitor "Monitor2"
Option "UseNvKmsCompositionPipeline" "false"
Option "ForceCompositionPipeline" "1"
EndSection```
And the nvidia-smi output:
```+---------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 530.30.02 Driver Version: 530.30.02 CUDA Version: 12.1 |
|-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M| Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap| Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
| | | MIG M. |
|=========================================+======================+======================|
| 0 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Off| 00000000:01:00.0 Off | N/A |
| N/A 42C P5 9W / 90W| 609MiB / 6144MiB | 3% Default |
| | | N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
+---------------------------------------------+
| Processes: |
| GPU GI CI PID Type Process name GPU Memory |
| ID ID Usage |
|=======================================================================================|
| 0 N/A N/A 1347 G /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg 307MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 2346 G /usr/bin/ksmserver 2MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 2348 G /usr/bin/kded5 2MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 2351 G /usr/bin/kwin_x11 75MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 2391 G /usr/bin/plasmashell 28MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 2412 G ...c/polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1 2MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 2461 G /usr/bin/birdtray 2MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 2471 G ...86_64-linux-gnu/libexec/kdeconnectd 2MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 2485 G /usr/bin/kaccess 2MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 2490 G ...-linux-gnu/libexec/DiscoverNotifier 12MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 2667 G /usr/lib/thunderbird/thunderbird 90MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 2700 G ...-gnu/libexec/xdg-desktop-portal-kde 2MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 3396 G ...61807972,1722809804713501230,262144 66MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 3587 G ...bin/plasma-browser-integration-host 2MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 3784 G /usr/bin/konsole 2MiB |
+---------------------------------------------+
I don't think I can use only the integrated gpu to have these 3 monitors as the USB-C output isn't physically wired to it, I suppose.
However, I would like to find a way of improving the performance and avoiding these frequent crashes, if anyone can give me some pointers.
