27 inch 4k display, NVIDIA and Ubuntu: Doesn’t work nicely

TLDR; It doesn’t work so nicely

I recently purchased a 4k display to go along with my Thinkpad T480 with GPU. For the first few days I used in 1440p as I didn’t have the USB C to HDMI cable for a 60hz (Thinkpad’s HDMI was not 2.0) . Then I bought one.

Ubuntu didn’t support fractional scaling on LTS release before 20.04. Since I am on Ubuntu 20.04 I thought this would work fine. I connected the cable and switched to 4k 60hz. That display was too small for my liking. I immediately switched to 125% scaling which is supported out of box on Ubuntu 20.04. I immediately noticed a serious lag. I checked what fps i am getting and got to know that it is around 24-32. So i switched back to 100% scaling and checked again. I am getting 59 fps. Then i checked all fractional scaling and saw there is a performance dip. Only scaling I didn’t get dip in performance was at 100% and 200%. I searched and saw that there is a performance hit for fractional scaling on Ubuntu. Some people have commented to use wayland session. But due to the nvidia drivers I cannot switch to wayland session.

I got annoyed and started testing other DE’s like cinnnamon, kde, deepin. I was more annoyed by other DE’s with things unrelated to fractional scaling. Uninstalled everything and came back to gnome.

Now I had some options. To use it too small at 100%. Or increase font scaling at 1.25 or use 1440p or use at 200% scaling. I tried font scaling 1.25, it doesn’t look proportional and i really didn’t want to use 1440p. 200% is too large. So ultimately I started using 4k display at 60hz with 100% scaling by turning on font scaling for 1.25.

I might ditch Ubuntu and go to windows with proper fractional scaling and use WSL2


Comments

Let's discuss now…

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.