Second graphics card not powerful enough for Qubes?

User Support Hardware Issues
1

Hey forum, love the OS,

I have an nVidia GeForce RTX 2080. It serves fairly well, and can run almost any game that I’ve tried at at least 60FPS. Qubes works without issue when my monitor/s are plugged into this graphics card

I bought a GeForce GT 730, so that the RTX 2080 can be used for GPU passthrough
When I’m running another OS using this graphics card, I can open browsers and the like without issue
However, when I boot up Qubes OS, while I can move my mouse normally without any qubes running, when I open a qube and navigate to a website/do something else, the mouse cursor’s movement stutters, and the audio of videos plays without the video keeping up
According to Task Manager on both dom0 and qubes, CPU usage is <15%, and Memory usaged is <50%, so I assume that it’s not CPU or memory that’s the issue…

Is my issue that:

  1. An nVidia GeForce GT 730 is not powerful enough for Qubes OS?
  2. Or do I need to do some optimisation somewhere?
  3. If 1), then what’s the minimum GPU that’s needed to do everything but game in Qubes OS smoothly?
  4. Or if 2), then how can I go about optimising?

Thank you

1 Like
2

I’m pretty sure the GT 730 is not strong enough to handle all qubes via dom0.

Do you have Intel onboard graphics by chance? This works well for me with a NVIDIA GeForce GPU on passthrough for a specific qube.

3

That’s what I was afraid of…but thank you; it’s better that I know
If anyone else can opine either way, please do so; multiple opinions are welcome

I might have onboard graphics, but I don’t have a suitable port for a monitor

Question is then 3) What is the minimum power of graphics card needed to run browsers, video, etc on qubes?

4

Might be cheaper to replace the monitor for using onboard graphics (plus the GPU video signal) then buying another GPU.

5

Graphics card is fine. Qubes barely uses it (it only runs dom0 graphics). Graphics in the qubes is handled by cpu. I have some ancient cards and they are fine. I do get that mouse stutter issue on my older desktops but it seems to be I/O related (occurs when sys-usb is heavily used). My newer desktops have no stutter but are just using iGPU.

Video esp high quality has issues on qubes. There’s a recent thread on here about it. You could put in a 5090 and it would still be there. Up the vCPUs and memory on the relevant qube

6

that’ would really depends…
but not on how many qubes you have, but:

  • how many displays?
  • how much pixels total to render?
  • which kernel and VGA driver you using in dom0 (or gui VM if you have)

And more importantly: what is your use case?

  • playing high res youtube videos? - then see the linked ‘issues’
  • or just ‘displaying’ your ‘normal’ applications?
    The later should work with your GPU without any issues - if using the proper drivers.
7

Might be the graphics drivers

Is Nvidia proprietary driver installation the most up-to-date instruction list, or is there something more recent than 2023?