Ytdyklly

After I installed fresh Ubuntu 18.04 with GNOME desktop and It had opensource driver I experienced very bad lag.

I Installed Nvidia 390 Driver and the lag was so bad. Changing the driver to Nvidia 340.106 didn't help.

I thought this is about Ubuntu 18.04, so I installed Fedora 28. on Wayland everything was smooth with open source driver but after Installing the 390 driver and switch to X11 lag started (but not as bad as Ubuntu).

I installed GNOME Impatience extension to reduce the lag but it didn't help that much.

I also tried Ubuntu Mate 18.04 with COMPIZ. On Mate, I had much more heavier Effects but those effects were so smooth.

Another Ubuntu 18.04 that I've tried was Budige that is based on the same GNOME. It didn't have any lag at all.

Also installed Nvidia 396 (opensource) from "ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa" repository. It just lags more.

Edit:

Installing sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall didn't solve the problem.
It just install Nvidia 390 driver which I tried before as I mentioned.

I don't have any high CPU usage issue:

nvidia-smi result:

+------------------------------------------------------+                       

| NVIDIA-SMI 340.106    Driver Version: 340.106        |                       

|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |

| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |

|===============================+======================+======================|

|   0  GeForce GTX 660 Ti  Off  | 0000:03:00.0     N/A |                  N/A |

| 10%   32C    P8    N/A /  N/A |    273MiB /  2047MiB |     N/A      Default |

+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+



+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

| Compute processes:                                               GPU Memory |

|  GPU       PID  Process name                                     Usage      |

|=============================================================================|

|    0            Not Supported                                               |

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

My System

• CPU: Intel i7 920


• GPU: Nvidia Geforce 660 ti


• RAM: 6GB

Is there anyway that I can solve this lag?

Same happened to me. Make sure:

1. You have less to no Gnome extensions. They can kill your computer. So, disable all Gnome extensions to see if that helps.


2. Disable animations from Gnome Tweak. That made my desktop super fast.


3. Nvidia 396 is really laggy for me as well so use the 960 one.

I stopped using Gnome 3 on Ubuntu 18.04 and replaced it with the Mate desktop using the lightdm display manager.

To replicate:

sudo apt install tasksel

sudo apt update

sudo tasksel install ubuntu-mate-desktop

sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm

sudo shutdown -r now

Unfortunately Gnome on 18.04 is really slow, even with the newest hardware (e.g. Dell XPS 13). If you wanna have a good experience on the LTS without switching to 18.10, the solutions are:

1. Using unity. You can choose it before logging in with your user.




2. Waiting until 18.04.2 update. Some patches of Gnome should be backported to LTS. We only can hope, that it will be the ones which make Gnome 3.30 faster.

I was experiencing a lot of lag on the splash screen with 18.04 and wanted to put this here as another solution. In my case I had been using an open source graphics card driver (Nouveau) instead of the Nvidia proprietary and it looks to have been the cause of the issue.

1. Go to Ubuntu Software app.


2. Open Software & Updates from the app's dropdown in the task bar.


3. Go to the Additional Drivers tab and see if you aren't using the recommended driver for your graphics card.

Once I switched from the Nouveau display driver to the Nvidia driver metapackage 390, everything ran much more smoothly.

Source

AFAIK Gnome doesn't work on 18.04 nVidia.

I was able to get 144 FPS on Compiz on 18.04 + GSYNC. (I only got like, 40-60 fps on Gnome and no GSYNC)
The first time I tried Compiz, it didn't work (I was on nVidia 396)
I did sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall (which put me on 390) and I rebooted then used the little picker icon on login to choose Compiz and it worked great. So I think 396 doesn't work with compiz yet but 390 does. Oddly 390 on Gnome makes me physically nauseous with my monitor but it's fine on compiz, so i think 390 on Gnome has a lot of strange refresh rate / redraw issues.

(It may be a GSYNC thing but I did get a pixelated word "NORMAL" in the upper right, which I got rid of by turning OpengGL flipping off in nvidia-settings)