NVIDIA is limiting your GPU power on Linux laptops, users claim

Linux is a great alternative for Windows, for the most part, but the system has its share of driver and compatibility issues.

Speaking of which, there are claims that NVIDIA is reducing your laptop’s performance on Linux. This seems like a serious issue, so let’s see why this happens.

NVIDIA is reducing your laptop performance on Linux, allegedly

According to users on Reddit ever since version 530.41, NVIDIA has been preventing some laptop GPUs from achieving their maximum power.

In addition, the nvidia-smi command is also removed, thus preventing users from manually adjusting the power limit.

This is a problem since your device will be underclocked, and not utilize its maximum power, thus reducing your performance.

This bug has been reported on GitHub since 2023, and it hasn’t been fixed for a year.

You can test if your device is affected

You can test if your device is affected by connecting it to a power outlet and running nvtop

The command will display your current GPU power as well as the maximum allowed power. If this value is different from the maximum TDP in your laptop’s hardware specifications, it means your device is affected.

Alternatively, you can use sudo nvidia-smi -q -d POWER

With this command, you’ll get the GPU’s maximum power limit and its “default” power limit. If the second value is lower than the first, your device is affected.

Is there a way to fix this issue?

There are partial workarounds available, that partially address the issue. You can enable dynamic boosting that will make your GPU draw more power with the following command:

sudo systemctl enable --now nvidia-powerd.service

You can also roll back to an older driver and use the following command to set the power limit manually: sudo nvidia-smi -pl your-power-limit-in-W

Many users are affected by this, and some reported this issue only in Ubunutu:

I had this issue. For some reason, the drivers were unlocked all the way TDP-wise in Fedora, but not Ubuntu.

It was a 4060 laptop, and under Ubuntu I had my GPU capped at 80W out of the 140W maximum.

As for affected cards, this issue appears only on the 20, 30, and 40 series, according to users:

The workaround will only work on Ampere or later cards. I have not seen any 10 series users complaining about this anywhere. All of them so far have been 20, 30 and 40 series users. But it is pretty easy to check if you’re affected.

As for the drop in performance, users reported that this issue caused them to lose about 20% or more of maximum power.

NVIDIA has released Game Ready Driver 551.76, but unfortunately, it doesn’t address this issue. We just hope that NVIDIA will address, or at least acknowledge this issue soon.