This is an old revision of the document!
I only have Nvidia cards so cant show how team red users do it :( sorry I dont really play games that much. Maybe someone else can create a section for team red :)
Green team: Nvidia drivers introduced a bug recently (like a year ago?) where you can only overclock if xorg is running with root privileges. This is a significant security issue so you should carfully decide if overclocking is worth the security risk.
However you do have 2 alternatives depending on your level of how important gaming is to you.
1) Modify /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config so that the file has the following lines edited/added:
allowed_users=anybody needs_root_rights=yes
This option allows green with envy to run normally and edit the gpu and memory offset itself as you wish.
2) (very inconvenient option) once you are booted into your desktop, you can change to a console using ctrl-alt-f5 for example and login as user 'root'. You can then run 'startx' on the cli and then login to a gdm session as root user. Opening Nvidia X server Settings will then allow you to edit values under powermizer (type a value and press enter). And you can then logout at the settings will stick and change back to your logged in user (ctrl-alt-f2).
This second method is very inconvenient as either you leave the session running if wanting to be able to change and test multiple values, which consumes some resources, or when you logout you are now stuck with the gpu and memory offsets unless you login again and change them back to 0. However as you do only login for a short time as root it is more secure, potentially, possibly. It is also inconvenient in that you must perform this action every single boot of your PC.
For this reason I will show you how to complete the overclock using method 1, however if you really want to login as root every time you turn on your pc and run startx then change the settings and logout and switch back to your regular user account, you are indeed free to do so. For me this is very uncool while method 1 required only editing a single file which can be later reverted if the Nvidia driver is fixed or simply changed if you dont need to game with an overclock present.
With this in mind you can follow along if you make the edits for method 1 above (to revert remove the needs_root_rights line and change allowed_users to 'console').
Once that file is edited you will need to also need to create a file and add some info to it:
sudo nano /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-nvidia.conf
Add the following text:
Section "OutputClass"
Identifier "nvidia"
MatchDriver "nvidia-drm"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "AllowEmptyInitialConfiguration"
Option "Coolbits" "12"
ModulePath "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/nvidia/xorg"
EndSection
