Nvidia-powered issues

Bazzite
1

Hello everyone,

I am running into a bit of an issue with bazzite-nvidia-open freshly installed on a “gaming” laptop. ( i5-12500h + 4060 mobile)

The system installed fine and the nvidia driver appears loaded corectly ( nvidia-smi provides the relevant information for the card) so at first glance everything seems fine. Trouble starts when i try to run a game (in this case D4 so a DX12 title running via Proton11 and VKD3D). At first glance the game runs fine in the menu, maybe a little overloaded on the GPU but still reaching the desired 60 fps (display is 60Hz so no need for anything else). Even in the menu the FPS values seem to be periodically going all over the place from 66 to 42, when i actually go into the game the overall FPS tanks to around 25.

While investigating the issue I can see in the PowerMizer from nvidia settings that the card is apparently boosting the clocks for the gpu and memory but via mangohud i can see the power hovering below 50W (the card is supposed to go to 60W normally and boost to 70W)

At this point i took a look at the nvidia services that are supposed to be running and noticed nvidia-powered (the one that is supposed to control power boost ) is not running.

○ nvidia-powerd.service - nvidia-powerd service
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/nvidia-powerd.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
    Drop-In: /usr/lib/systemd/system/service.d
             └─10-timeout-abort.conf
     Active: inactive (dead)
  Condition: start condition unmet at Sat 2026-07-18 14:46:35 EEST; 4min 16s ago
             └─ ConditionPathExistsGlob=/dev/nvidia* was not met

Jul 18 14:46:35 panda systemd[1]: nvidia-powerd.service - nvidia-powerd service skipped, unmet condition check ConditionPathExistsGlob=/dev/nvidia*

I have enabled supergfxctl as per the FAQ but this did not help. Both nvidia-powered and nvidia-persistanced are off with the same error. If i manually enable them once i am logged into the system it doesn’t seem to help.

On arch installed on the same hardware this issue is not present. I took a look at the nvidia-powered.service provided by nvidia in their driver package and cannot find that start condition.

2

I never noticed it until you mentioned it here. I tried something and it worked for me, you can try this.

  1. Create new directory here: /etc/systemd/system/nvidia-powerd.service.d
  2. Create a file there /etc/systemd/system/nvidia-powerd.service.d/override.conf and add the followin content:

[Unit]
After=nvidia-cdi-refresh.service
Wants=nvidia-cdi-refresh.service

  1. Reload and enable the nvidia-cdi service as it does something to make the system see the nvidia devices during boot.

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

sudo systemctl enable nvidia-cdi-refresh.service

  1. Reboot
  2. nvidia-powerd.service should not be running over a reboot, check it.

systemctl status nvidia-powerd.service

I actually have no idea does it does, but isn’t the manager manager by the nvidia driver on not nvidia-powerd.service?

The only thing I notice for my system is that it doesn’t seem to support my cpu.

Jul 18 18:03:35 anubis nvidia-powerd[2250]: ERROR! UnSupported CPU: 2.
Jul 18 18:03:35 anubis nvidia-powerd[2250]: ERROR! UnSupported System.

Looking into it further it seems to be specifically for laptops, so I guess I don’t need it then.

So I guess I don’t need it. Do you have a laptop?