You are doing everything at your OWN risk! I do not hold any liability for any damage done to your hardware!

Zephyrus G15 "GA502IV" Tweaks (2020 model)

Here I just want to share my personal tweaks/scripts that I use on my daily-driver laptop.

I use Arch, btw. Do note that thing(s) like changing the screen refresh rate will probably only work on the KDE Plasma Wayland session. If you use something else, then you will need to adjust the xxxhz.service systemd services located in "config/systemd/user/".

Applying Kernel parameters

For GRUB users: When we are setting certain kernel parameters, we put these parameters into the line called GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT= which is located in the /etc/default/grub file. After we are done setting the parameters we need to regenerate the grub config by typing sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg into the terminal. Then reboot for the changes to apply.

NVIDIA GPU D3 power state on Arch Linux

All of this was tested on KDE Plasma using the Wayland session and SDDM as the Login Manager.

Of course many people probably use the supergfxctl tool to manage their NVIDIA GPU whether you want to disable it or enable it. But it has one big disadvantage, you always have to logout from your current session to actually change to the desired mode. The thing is that it is possible to use the D3 power state (like in Windows) but it is kinda broken on Linux without some manual tweaking. Of course big thanks goes to whyyfu from reddit (post) for providing the information for making D3 to work in Linux!

This means that you can use the GPU whenever you want but when you for example stop playing a game the GPU will automatically turn it's self off to preserve power, leading to better battery life overall. Which is probably what everyone wants!

Of course this is done when using the proprietary drivers!

And you need at LEAST a Ryzen 4000 series Zen 2 CPU (older have to be tested) and the GPU to be based on Turing!

So here are the steps you have to take to make D3 power state work

1. • Create a file called nvidia.conf in /etc/modprobe.d/ by typing sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf into terminal and copy/paste options nvidia "NVreg_DynamicPowerManagement=0x02" into the file. This enables the power management.
2. • Turn off NVIDIA modeset by putting nvidia-drm.modeset=0 in the kernel cmdline, and for good measure also rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau modprobe.blacklist=nouveau, this will block nouveau from loading. (Do note that changing nvidia modesetting to 0 causes screen tearing in games, even on Wayland! Setting it to 1 prevents the GPU to suspend, but is still much easier to suspend manually.)
3. • Run sudo rm -f /usr/share/glvnd/egl_vendor.d/10_nvidia.json. This file points to the EGL library, but that file seems to prevent the GPU from going into the D3 power state, so we remove it.
4. • And if you are using any login/display managers that uses Xorg you will have to remove (Please backup these files if anything goes wrong!) any config that points to NVIDIA because that seems to load an Xorg process on the GPU that will always run on it and will prevent the GPU from going into the D3 state. These configs are located in /etc/X11/ etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ and /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/. There should be one located in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/ named 10-nvidia-drm-outputclass.conf, so delete it.
5. • Create a new file at /lib/udev/rules.d/ called 80-nvidia-pm.rules and copy/paste this into it

#Remove NVIDIA USB xHCI Host Controller devices, if present
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="pci", ATTR{vendor}=="0x10de", ATTR{class}=="0x0c0330", ATTR{remove}="1"

#Remove NVIDIA USB Type-C UCSI devices, if present
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="pci", ATTR{vendor}=="0x10de", ATTR{class}=="0x0c8000", ATTR{remove}="1"

#Remove NVIDIA Audio devices, if present
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="pci", ATTR{vendor}=="0x10de", ATTR{class}=="0x040300", ATTR{remove}="1"

#Enable runtime PM for NVIDIA VGA/3D controller devices on driver bind
ACTION=="bind", SUBSYSTEM=="pci", ATTR{vendor}=="0x10de", ATTR{class}=="0x030000", TEST=="power/control", ATTR{power/control}="auto"
ACTION=="bind", SUBSYSTEM=="pci", ATTR{vendor}=="0x10de", ATTR{class}=="0x030200", TEST=="power/control", ATTR{power/control}="auto"

#Disable runtime PM for NVIDIA VGA/3D controller devices on driver unbind
ACTION=="unbind", SUBSYSTEM=="pci", ATTR{vendor}=="0x10de", ATTR{class}=="0x030000", TEST=="power/control", ATTR{power/control}="on"
ACTION=="unbind", SUBSYSTEM=="pci", ATTR{vendor}=="0x10de", ATTR{class}=="0x030200", TEST=="power/control", ATTR{power/control}="on"

• Reboot, ?????, Profit

To check if it worked, run cat /sys/class/drm/card{0,1}/device/power_state in terminal and it should show D3cold, that means it's off, and should turn on (showing D0) when you run nvidia-smi or nvtop

To check power draw, run cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/power_now in terminal.

Beware that after each update of the NVIDIA package you will have to repeat steps 3 and 4!

CPU/iGPU Tweaks

Required packages are: ryzenadj, kscreen (on KDE Plasma Wayland)

I have made a simple script where you can adjust all sorts of values that will change depending on what power profile you will use (Power Save / Balanced / Performance). For example you can choose the maximum power draw of the CPU, enable or disable cpu boost clocks and much more.

To "install" this script you have to put the bash script power-profiles into /usr/local/bin/. To have the script started at boot you have to create a systemd service, one way is to copy the power-profiles.service file to /etc/systemd/system/, then type sudo systemctl daemon-reload and sudo systemctl enable power-profiles --now in your terminal to enable/start the service. For the Refresh Rate changing stuff, you need to copy the systemd services found in config/systemd/user/{60hz.service,120hz.service} to your .config/systemd/user/ directory located in your home directory.

Miscellaneous tweaks

Increasing the shared VRAM for the AMD APU from the default 3GB to 4GB (or more if you want). To increase VRAM you need to add amdgpu.gttsize=4096 in the kernel cmdline. (Size is in MEGABYTES, so 4096 equals to 4GB)

Decrease your power usage (at least at idle) by using these kernel boot parameters: "pcie_aspm=force pcie_aspm.policy=powersave"