Another graphics issue - Gigabyte GTX1050ti

[willmorrison]

Hey there, kids,
I decided to go ahead and get a new graphics card in my continuing quest to actually get the screen resolution I'm SUPPOSED to be getting. So after my previous issues with my old car not being able to give me more than 1920 x 1080, I went ahead and got a new card. Supposed to give me MORE than what my monitor can do, a gigabyte 1050ti.

Put it in, fired it up, got the motherboard splash screen, no problem, got to the Grub menu, and it's now in 640 x 480. Got ONCE to a very distorted screen that I THINK was the AV linux start up screen. Couldn't tell, it was so distorted, and only on half the screen. Rebooted, tried checking the BIOS settings, tried two different OS disks, tried booting from the AVLinux CD. After the initial boot, it does nothing. I can get to the grub screen, but then it gets into this look of just not booting, seeming to get into a loop it can't get out of. Even tried two different monitors on it, no difference in behavior.

Did I get a bad card? I can't seem to get anything out of this no matter what I try. I've tried shutting down about a dozen times, with no success at any attempted reboot.

This is on an ASUS PZ77-v motherboard, I7-3770K, 32GB Ram, and now this graphics card as well as two different Samsung monitors. Did I get a bad one? Neither AVLinux or Ubuntu studio seem to want to TOUCH this card, which is odd, I read up on it and everyone seems to have no issues with it.

Any suggestions? I'm open to ANY. THis is annoying as all get out, I've had nothing but issues with graphics on this thing.

[Kott]

Monitor's resolution/hz is reported to system via EDID. So I guess that this information somehow is broken, it can be due bad cables or monitor bug.
You can play with edid settings in bootloader, some useful info: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ke ... de_setting

[willmorrison]

Been there, tried that, as far as the monitors and cables are concerned. Brand new on each, monitors capable of upwards of 8Kx8K, cables are brand new, up to spec. I can't get to where I can see a t4ext screen to know what it THINKS it's doing.

I'll check the bootloader file and see what i can come up with. The card should be good for up past 7Kx 6K, the monitor I'm trying to use is a Samsung UHD that wants to see 3+K native. Why none of this stuff is talking properly to each other is annoying.

Thanks, I'll look into that.

[Kott]

Yeah, try to set "nomodeset" in kernel boot option at first.

[willmorrison]

Well, here is the final story. I thought about it, and it didn't seem like something I should HAVE to do for this machine, so I went ahead and overnighted an AMD Radeon 580 instead of messing with the Nvidia card. It showed up today, slapped it in and INSTANTLY it works. That's all it should HAVE to do. Thanks to all who suggested things, I may still use your suggestions, I haven't decided what to do with this Nvidia card, yet. I may just send it back, in which case no big deal. Or I might keep it and put it in my daily machine and see if I can't get THAT one up and running with it. Not that I would notice ANY improvement in what I'm doing with that machine, but at least I wouldn't have to deal with refunding and all that. We'll see what I end up doing.

But this just surprises me, I couldn't even get it to boot properly, let alone give me ANY kind of performance. It used to be that a card would at least get you a screen, Nvidia seems to have forgotten how to even do that. Not even a basic 640 x 480! Sad. Anyways, thanks again for the help. Guess after 30 years of playing with Linux, I would think that the manufacturers would at least get hip to making things work. Granted, we're a small market, but we're a market nonetheless. One would think that a manufacturer would want everyone on his side he could get. This isn't doing that.

[JamesPeters]

If you installed a low latency or RT kernel (depending on the distro, and your case with AVlinux that's the default kernel), and the nvidia proprietary drivers, there's a possibility the distro's software manager didn't pull in the required RT module for the specific version of the nvidia proprietary driver. I've noticed Ubuntu-based distros are pretty good at doing this automatically, but Debian-based and Arch-based distros...not so much. So when I install a RT or low latency kernel with my system set to use the nvidia proprietary driver, upon the first reboot to the RT or low latency kernel...the DE doesn't want to display (I get a cursor on the screen and if I'm lucky some kind of message about something failing to start).

For Manjaro for instance I had to add the package named for the kernel I'm using, the version number of the proprietary nvidia driver I'm using, and "RT" is also in the name. "linux59-rt-nvidia-455xx" (Linux kernel is 5.9.0-1, nvidia driver version is 455.28). I had to reboot to the generic kernel (so I could use graphics-based applications), go to the software manager, find the appropriate nvidia RT module package, install it, then reboot to the RT kernel again. After that it was fine.

Given that AVlinux is based on Debian, and knowing how I had to deal with this issue when I tried MX Linux (also Debian-based) recently, this sort of thing doesn't surprise me.

I've read that apparently there are some recent nvidia packages which have ambiguous descriptions/version numbers in repos, which caused some issue, so maybe distros are usually better at picking up on this with the "metapackage" approach than they currently are. I wish I'd bookmarked that info that I found because I forgot where I read it (after searching around trying to figure out what happened with the nvidia driver I'd installed and why I couldn't get the DE to load).

What I mean by "metapackage": you choose a package which installs whatever it needs to, instead of just one particular package. Even though Manjaro has a driver install manager for video cards, and I'd have expected it to be "smart enough" to know what kernel I'm using (a RT kernel from the Manjaro repo), it didn't automatically add the RT module package for the nvidia driver. That's what caught me off guard.

There's apparently a love-hate relationship with nvidia and Linux. nvidia makes excellent cards, and their drivers seem good too. But getting their proprietary drivers (that aspect of which is frowned upon by a lot of Linux people) to work seamlessly in all distros...it seems there are some gaps there.

[sunrat]

James Peters is spot-on about Debian/AVL and RT kernels, there is no nvidia driver available that will build for them. I believe Manjaro (and maybe Arch) custom patch the nvidia driver to work on their RT kernel.
Most audio work doesn't actually need an RT kernel though. I currently use Debian Buster with a low-latency Liquorix 5.8.0-17.1 kernel quite happily with Nvidia 450.66 driver with my GTX970. I don't install the metapackage to automatically update kernels to avoid the nasty surprise when the kernel updates a point version and nvidia takes a little time to catch up. Liquorix 5.8.0-17.1 is the latest 5.8 kernel currently and I don't see a 5.9 one available yet although I believe Nvidia driver can work on 5.9 in Debian unstable now.
You have likely made life easier for yourself by getting the AMD graphics card and I would probably do the same if I were to build a new system now.

[JamesPeters]

I only consider using a "RT" kernel if it's part of the main repo, as it is for Manjaro. Manjaro doesn't have a lowlatency kernel in the repo but they do have the RT kernel...whatever they mean by "RT" anyway. It seems to perform similarly to the lowlatency kernel in the Ubuntu repo (when using Ubuntu-based distros). I only use kernels in the main repos of the distros. I'm not particularly chasing "the best realtime kernel" or something; I'm only looking to match the performance of whatever lowlatency kernel is in the Ubuntu repos (when I'm not using an Ubuntu-based distro).

To clarify what I said in my previous post, just in case: I'm not saying that the proprietary nvidia drivers "won't build" for a particular distro (I have no experience with AVlinux, so I can't really say much about it other than what I'm presuming since it's based on Debian). What I meant was: when getting the proprietary nvidia driver from the repo for whatever distro I use (which is the only way I get the nvidia drivers for the distro), if I boot to the lowlatency or RT kernel for some distros, sometimes it won't show the desktop because it didn't automatically install the RT module for the proprietary nvidia driver. To fix this, I have to also add the specific RT module for the nvidia proprietary driver myself (which I also get from the repo). After that, when I boot to the lowlatency or RT kernel, I can see the desktop. If such a process isn't possible for AVlinux (if there's no RT module for nvidia proprietary drivers in the repo), I wouldn't know.