nvtop VS nvidia-vaapi-driver

If you're certain your GPU has deeper power saving states than P8, I would start by checking why it's not using them. Maybe tlp, powertop or nvtop (or their documentation) can help.

Did you run any of the "dashboards" while executing the test? Like [NvTop](https://github.com/Syllo/nvtop)

If you plan on making a system monitor/task manager, could you please make it display actual useful information and not just extremely basic stats like most do now. GNOME and KDE both have overly simple applications for this, that just show the CPU and memory utilisation, and it makes finding information like the processor frequency and temperature so much more difficult. On Windows, for example, the task manager performance tab shows a much greater amount of information for each system component, not just total utilisation. GPU usage is also never shown in any of the popular system monitors, something that's probably important for a lot of users. It's not even necessarily impossible since projects such as nvtop are able to. I do hope we'll eventually get a much better GUI program for monitoring our system in Linux.

Can't nvtop do that?

I'm looking for an alternative to nvtop. It's a Ncidia monitoring tool for Linux. You can easily monitor or kill processes via terminal. I used the nvidia-smi command on windows commanline, but it gives very little information.

Try monitoring your VRAM using nvtop (or something), then run training, if the VRAM maxed, training stopped, then VRAM dropped, then it's 100% not enough VRAM.

The "nv" in "nvtop" originally stood for NVidia, and was only changed to Neat Videocard last year when it added support for AMD cards (after having been "NVidia TOP" for 5 years!) https://github.com/Syllo/nvtop/commit/fe28a13c78ddb395245f86bc0a33e6a5978f594a

For anyone wondering, I got hardware acceleration working (NVIDIA 1660 Super: h264, vp8, vp9, don't know why I can't get HEVC support currently) using the nvidia-driver-545 using the steps from nvidia-vaapi-driver to build from source (version: 0.0.11)

I don't think it's your fault and I don't think you're using the wrong browser.

> I should be working out the dependency story and compiling some driver from Github myself.

no, nvidia _should_ make it easier for people using the 3rd most popular desktop OS to use their hardware. It would make them more competitive against AMD and Intel, which both support hardware video decoding.

That's probably not going to happen, so the next best option is to install a package from the package manager [0]. There might be some kind of compilation needed, but in my experience that's rarely an issue (aside from time), especially if it's coming out of the package manager for a popular distribution.

> It's just not a real option for maybe 99% of PC users.

well, 99% of PC users with Nvidia hardware. It's an important distinction since this problem is specific to Nvidia. If the solution is to installing a package from the package manager, it's only as difficult as installing the browser in the first place.

I do agree there's some extra questions that may make things difficult, or unfamiliar for the vast majority of people, though. Like how is someone supposed to know they need the nvidia-vaapi-driver package anyway?

[0] - https://github.com/elFarto/nvidia-vaapi-driver#package-manag...

to be honest, pop os solved most of my problems except the hardware acceleration problem which seems like an issue with Nvidia. I am planning to try this soon. https://github.com/elFarto/nvidia-vaapi-driver/ as mentioned in the comments

RpmFusion only has v0.0.9 of nvidia-vaapi-driver although release v0.0.10 adds support for Nvidia drivers v535. https://github.com/elFarto/nvidia-vaapi-driver/releases/tag/v0.0.10

I do have one machine with the Firefox PPA rather than the snap, and that's because I've got an NVIDIA card in it and want to use an experimental library.

Note that as an nvidia gpu owner you need to do some extra backflips to make firefox use hardware decoding such as installing a custom vaapi-to-nvdec translation driver: https://github.com/elFarto/nvidia-vaapi-driver

General VDPAU vs VA-API video acceleration pains. Needing a community driver for imperfect VA-API support, that nvidia updates have broken multiple times.

Don't use VDPAU, this driver is much better: https://github.com/elFarto/nvidia-vaapi-driver