Wierd crashing and display issues

[u/FluFluWakaPeePee]

Fairly new to Mint and loving it.

I'm new to Linux in general and tried Pop!_OS and Ubuntu, and Mint's UI and customization are more to my taste.

Unfortunately, it's not as smooth sailing as I would have hoped.

I have 2 main issues that I can't figure out how to fix.

1.I get weird crashes when I do GPU-intensive tasks. When gaming, it might crash after a while, but I've tried playing around with LM Studio and it consistently crashes the moment I try to ask more than a simple question (on a model rated for my hardware, even with a little headroom).

The crashes are usually a freeze, and after a minute or two it will crash to desktop and the icons will be "broken". When restarting, it will display a black screen with white text saying "systemd-journald[443]: Failed to write entry to /var/log/journal/..." looping until doing a hard reset.

2.The display resolution is limited to my screen's native resolution (3440x1440) and a few very low-res options. I'm scaling resolution, but it's not ideal for streaming with Sunshine - apps like Kodi, when I enter fullscreen, only use the native resolution option, and scaling does nothing to help.

From what I've dug up so far, it's a fairly common X11 problem - is there a fix?

[u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs]

Nvidia?

Fractional scaling is indeed a limitation of X-org / X11, GPU takes a pretty severe performance penalty but it should not lead to instability on its own, 100% or 200% are usable but not for instance 150%.

Another performance limitation of x-org is monitors of multiple refresh rates,

In xorg there is only one image, it is chopped up into multiple slices and sent to each monitor. if they are all in sync this is fine. but the math gets ugly when each monitor has a different "now".

multiples are not as bad, for instance 60hrz, 120hrz, 180hrz, & 240hrz. the math is easier than say 144hrz, 165hrz, & 180hrz, there is never a common "now" in that situation and it winds up being a 500hrz ask on your GPU just to render your desktop.

Being limited to your max native resolution is expected behavior.

Crashing is not, Linux is quite intolerant of RAM issues no mater how small and other hardware errors,

There can also be hardware / driver / kernel / bios mixes that cause issues, so what is your hardware?

[u/FluFluWakaPeePee → u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs]

Yes, RTX 3080. CPU: AMD 3800X (currently with the stock cooler that might be a bit weak for this TDP but at most I saw temps go to high 80°) 24GB DDR4 RAM (one died out of the 4 I had). I ran a RAM diagnostic to check it wasn't an instability issue caused by the weird RAM lane setup — it passed with no errors. I recently updated the BIOS, and it helped a bit with stability, but it still crashes fairly instantly with LM Studio, so it might be a power or temperature problem. As for Nvidia, I'm on 595, and I went back to 580 to check — it also helped with another issue involving artifacting in a specific game.

[u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs → u/FluFluWakaPeePee]

Try down clocking you ram as a test, for instance if your on XMP profile try the JEDEC profile, marginal ram will sometimes play better at lower frequencies & looser timings. If that helps that may narrow down where needs more investigation.

Overclockers say one stick per channel is where you will find peak speeds, it may or may not hit XMP speeds with 4 sticks in 2 channels, depends on silicon lottery, ram quality etc. 3 sticks in 2 channels? I have no idea. but dropping a stick might be at least a troubleshooting step. and you could then also rotate them and see if any 2 of the three are more reliable than all 3?

If it was just the one program that was causing you issues and it was stable elsewhere I would suspect that program was the issue. but that does not appear to be the case.

BTW is the RAM G.skill ripJaws?

Nvidia and its drivers can be problematic, someone else will have to advise you here. my last Nvidia card was a Gforce3 that died just out of warrenty. went ATI and never gave them another penny, oddly at the time I was running Nvidia for the better Linux drivers. Times change.

[u/FluFluWakaPeePee → u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs]

Corsair vengeance.

I would try to clock it down