I just upgraded my desktop to the new AMD Ryzen 3900X and on that occasion also replaced my decade (!) old GPU with a recent Nvidia RTX 2060. Initially I couldn't get it to output audio to the speakers in my monitor (connected using DisplayPort).
Finally, using pavucontrol to switch of the other HD-Audio Generic device did the trick.
After some more research I also discovered volumeicon, a small app that shows a volume control in the system tray (i3 in my case). It can be configured to open an external mixer on click (pavucontrol) and can also be directly used to control the volume by scrolling. Awesome!
Tags: linux