Stuttering with Nvidia 384.90 Driver + Fedora 26, Possible Solution
rstrube Oct 8, 2017
Hi Everyone,

I noticed a couple weeks ago that my system was exhibiting some very annoying stuttering. This would occur when typing, scrolling on a webpage, watching a video on Youtube, essentially pretty much anything I did. The stutter would occur every 5-10 seconds, and was like a micro-hitch.

I've been living with it for a while, it's annoying, but not a show-stopper.

Today I decided to investigate the issue, and I was able to find a solution. Turns out the problem was caused by more recent version of the nvidia driver. I'm running Fedora 26 and using the negativo17 repos.

The solve the problem I completely uninstalled the most recent version of the nvidia driver:

sudo dnf remove nvidia-settings nvidia-driver dkms-nvidia nvidia-driver-libs nvidia-driver-libs.i686

I then rebooted and went into X using Nouveau.

I then installed the older version of the Nvidia driver from the negativo repos using the following command:

sudo dnf install dkms-nvidia-2:384.59-1.fc26 nvidia-driver-libs-2:384.59-6.fc26.i686

Then I rebooted again and the micro stutter has almost completely been removed.

So for me, reverting back to 384.59 appeared to solve my stuttering problem. I hope this solves others that are running into this problem.

As a side note I'm very much looking forward to ditching my Nivida card and moving to Vega when Fedora starts to use kernel 4.15. I'm sick of these proprietary drivers!
devnull Oct 31, 2017
Would it surprise you if I said this was happening to me too?

Few quuestions:
- What GPU do you have?
- Did you notice odd fan behavior as well? Fan starting and stopping at a very low RPM and only for a few seconds?
- Assuming they are addressable, did the LED's do anything similar, turning on and off randomly?

For whatever reason I have two systems exhibiting the same thing. Both have vastly different hardware aside from using NVIDIA GPUs (one with two 9800's, the other a 1080TI). Doesn't appear it's a thermal issue as they do it while idle too (temps are 38C and under anyway). The 9800's look more like fan twitching sometimes. Maybe a voltage problem.
Skiski Nov 2, 2017
I also have problems since I upgraded to 384.90-1 but I just realised that the kmod is not loaded and instead nouveau is back...
Ok, I just got back to kernel 4.13.5-200, instead of 4.13.9-200 and it solves the problem. I've got the 384.90-1 driver and it seems to work.
Julius Nov 3, 2017
Also try logging into a pure X.org gnome and not the Wayland version. I had some strange similar sounding issues with Wayland but on an Intel card.
devnull Jan 2, 2018
Maybe related to the bug NVIDIA is apparently aware
of ?

They were supposed to release a new driver by end of December but well, guess it didn't happen.

tl;DR - "27% framerate drop between the 375.82 and 387.34 ".
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