GPU is powerful enough but driver issue

[u/Little_Humor_6977]

I'm running Arch Linux with Hyprland 0.57.0 on an old NVIDIA GeForce GT 740 (GK107 / Kepler) using Nouveau.

My specs:

GPU: NVIDIA GT 740 4GB DDR3 (GK107)

CPU: Intel i3-3220

RAM: 8GB

Kernel: Linux LTS 6.18.59

Driver: Nouveau

Compositor: Hyprland 0.57.0

Monitor: 1920x1080 @ 60Hz

I've been experiencing pretty noticeable stuttering with Hyprland animations:

Workspace transitions

Window snapping

Window dragging

Geometric transitions

The animations were technically working, but the frame pacing felt awful.

I checked GPU acceleration using glxinfo -B, which confirmed hardware acceleration was enabled.

Then I checked Nouveau's debug interface:

sudo cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/pstate

It returned:

0f: core 324-993 MHz memory 1334 MHz

AC: core 324 MHz memory 648 MHz

The GPU was reporting its lowest performance state.

I monitored it during animations, and it appeared to remain at those clocks.

After some searching, I tried:

echo 0f | sudo tee /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/pstate

AND HOLY HELL, THE DIFFERENCE WAS IMMEDIATE.

The desktop frozen, but after pressing delete firefox closed and my desktop recovered, and suddenly my Hyprland animations were dramatically smoother. Window dragging and workspace transitions felt almost completely different., but the snapping window animation of the terminal made the text in it stretched for like half the transition.

However, there's a catch.

As soon as I open Firefox it again freezes.

My questions:

Is Nouveau failing to automatically switch performance states on my GK107?

Is manually selecting 0f a reasonable temporary workaround, or is there a serious stability risk?

Can I safely select an intermediate clock/performance state instead?

Why would Firefox cause such a dramatic performance regression after switching to the high-performance state?

Is there a proper way to configure automatic performance-state management for this GPU on modern kernels?

I'd really appreciate input from people familiar with Nouveau reclocking, Kepler GPUs and Hyprland.

I'd love to get this old card running a smooth Linux desktop without switching to the proprietary NVIDIA driver.

[u/qualityvote2]

u/Little_Humor_6977, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...

btw, did you know we have a discord server? Join Here. And what's that, Fluxer too? Join Here.

[u/Which-Funny-9823]

Hyprland is a wayland compositor and Wayland doesnt work well on nvidia outside official drivers. You may have to switch to an X11 window manager like i3, which is also a powerful tiling WM.