KDE Plasma Issues Caused by Nvidia Drivers in Archlinux

This article targets graphics cards of Turing (NV160/TUXXX) and later models. You can check your graphics card model with lspci -k | grep -A 2 -E "(VGA|3D)"

On the Linux platform, Nvidia drivers are divided into 3 types:

• nvidia/nvidia-dkms Nvidia official proprietary driver
• nvidia-open/nvidia-open-dkms Nvidia official semi-open source driver
• nouveau Third-party open source driver

The official drivers, whether proprietary or semi-open source, perform much better in gaming than third-party open source drivers. The difference between versions with and without the dkms suffix is that versions without the suffix are for the standard Linux kernel, while versions with the suffix are for other kernels.

Issues and Solutions

Official Kernel

After the driver was updated to version 555, KDE Plasma animations started stuttering and dropping frames. This is caused by instability in the GSP (RISC-V processor) introduced by Nvidia.
This issue still exists in the current driver version (560) and can be resolved by disabling GSP, but only the proprietary driver can disable GSP - the semi-open source driver cannot.

The specific solution is to add the kernel parameter nvidia.NVreg_EnableGpuFirmware=0
There are many ways to add kernel parameters depending on the boot method used. For details, see ArchWiki or this post

Save and reboot.

Third-party Open Source Kernel

Third-party open source kernels don’t cause KDE Plasma stuttering issues, but they prevent screen brightness adjustment. This can be resolved by adding the kernel parameter acpi_backlight=none.