nVidia GPU not being utilized

Hi,

I have a clean install of Fedora 36 (Cinnamon Spin) on my laptop which has an i7-4500U and a GT750M. I installed the nVidia drivers following this tutorial, and since the GPU is 700 series, installed the appropriate 470xx drivers.

Rebooted the system and I don’t see any utilization even when playing a video file.

tonyrulez@dell:~$ nvidia-smi
Tue May 10 19:15:54 2022       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 470.103.01   Driver Version: 470.103.01   CUDA Version: 11.4     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                               |                      |               MIG M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce ...  Off  | 00000000:04:00.0 N/A |                  N/A |
| N/A   55C    P8    N/A /  N/A |      3MiB /  2002MiB |     N/A      Default |
|                               |                      |                  N/A |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
 
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                  |
|  GPU   GI   CI        PID   Type   Process name                  GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                   Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|  No running processes found                                                 |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Same in nvidia-settings, no utilization.

I tried setting the nVidia GPU as primary using this tutorial. After setting Option "PrimaryGPU" "yes" and rebooting, the screen was black. Deleting this line from rescue resolved the issue.

How can I set the GPU to be used?

That setting should work if you run Xorg instead of Wayland and the OEM supports it. Occasionally, vendors will hardwire/code the GPU so that the primary GPU is the integrated one (esp. when docked). Alternatively, you should be able to run on your integrated graphics and launch apps on nvidia with DRI_PRIME=1.

tonyrulez@dell:~$ echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE
x11

Unfortunately running app with DRI_PRIME=1 results this:

tonyrulez@dell:~$ DRI_PRIME=1 smplayer
libGL error: failed to create dri screen
libGL error: failed to load driver: nouveau