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kreyszig

Member

Registered: 2012-04-17

Posts: 8

Poor glxgears Performance with Nvidia 4200M

Hello everyone!

So I have this new Thinkpad T420 laptop with i7 CPU, integrated HD 3000 graphics and Nvidia 4200M and my end goal is to get bumblebee to work. I followed the instructions on the wiki and it seems the nvidia-bumblebee driver is loaded properly (no error or warning in dmesg and nvidia-settings works fine), but I end up getting lower performance with the GPU than with the integrated graphics. I tried also configuring the laptop to only use the Nvidia chipset by disabling Optimus in the BIOS and this also results in poor performance of glxgears, although not as bad. Here are the results I get when running glxgears -geometry 1600x900 in the different configurations:

-Integrated graphics (with Optimus): 188 FPS
-Optirun:                                             127 FPS
-Optirun -c rgb:                                    79 FPS
-Nvidia (Optimus disabled):                150 FPS

What could be causing this? I made sure to install Nvidia-utils and the Nvidia driver at the end... Also Nvidia-settings shows that the GPU is running at its maximum frequency during the test. Finally, I tried the same tests on Ubuntu and I got similar results

thanks!

brebs

Member

Registered: 2007-04-03

Posts: 3,742

Re: Poor glxgears Performance with Nvidia 4200M

Maybe nvidia bug with 295.40

kreyszig

Member

Registered: 2012-04-17

Posts: 8

Re: Poor glxgears Performance with Nvidia 4200M

Maybe nvidia bug with 295.40

This is possible... I will try 295.33 .

Thanks!

kreyszig

Member

Registered: 2012-04-17

Posts: 8

Re: Poor glxgears Performance with Nvidia 4200M

Ok, so I just tried 295.33 and the result is identical with Optimus. However, I tried installing directly the version 295.33 of the Nvidia driver after disabling Optimus in the BIOS and I now get 1045 FPS from glxgears -geometry 1600x900 . So what could I be missing with bumblebee then?

Thanks!

Last edited by kreyszig (2012-04-18 15:02:00)

Gusar

Member

Registered: 2009-08-25

Posts: 3,607

Re: Poor glxgears Performance with Nvidia 4200M

You did test other stuff too and not just glxgears, right?

Bumblebee will have a performance penalty, it is after all just a big giant hack, but still, it should be noticeably faster than integrated graphics.

Last edited by Gusar (2012-04-18 15:08:57)

kreyszig

Member

Registered: 2012-04-17

Posts: 8

Re: Poor glxgears Performance with Nvidia 4200M

You did test other stuff too and not just glxgears, right?

Bumblebee will have a performance penalty, it is after all just a big giant hack, but still, it should be noticeably faster than integrated graphics.

I ran nvidia-settings from optirun and looked at the GLX Information page. It says it is using direct rendering. In display configuration though I see that the max resolution is only 640x480 and I am running glxgears at 1600x900... Here are the results from glxgears with the default geometry and 1600x900 (always using Optimus)

-Integrated default: 1684 FPS
-Integrated 1600x900: 180 FPS
-optirun default: 1419 FPS
-optirun 1600x900: 126 FPS

So optirun seems to be slower than the integrated graphics no matter which resolution I am using... Supposing that something is screwed up with the order I used to compile the different related packages, what should be the right order? So far I have always tried to finish by compiling and installing nvidia-utils-bumblebee and nvidia-bumblebee from AUR

Thanks!

Last edited by kreyszig (2012-04-18 16:33:01)

Gusar

Member

Registered: 2009-08-25

Posts: 3,607

Re: Poor glxgears Performance with Nvidia 4200M

Err, my point was to test with something other than glxgears.

kreyszig

Member

Registered: 2012-04-17

Posts: 8

Re: Poor glxgears Performance with Nvidia 4200M

Err, my point was to test with something other than glxgears.

I just tried a GLPlanet preview on xscreensaver, using maximum load. I get 75-125 FPS with the integrated graphics and 119 FPS with optirun

kreyszig

Member

Registered: 2012-04-17

Posts: 8

Re: Poor glxgears Performance with Nvidia 4200M

Anyone has an idea about what could be causing this problem?

Thanks!

beta990

Member

Registered: 2011-07-10

Posts: 207

Re: Poor glxgears Performance with Nvidia 4200M

Same issue here. Remind this is running in a 'Virtual X' window. This will also effect performance.

From what I read on the Bumblebee-project wiki/git this is common issue.

Did you also test it with an other program than glxgears? Seems that glxgears sometimes doesnt show the correct FPS. (when Vsync is enabled, etc.)

kreyszig

Member

Registered: 2012-04-17

Posts: 8

Re: Poor glxgears Performance with Nvidia 4200M

Same issue here. Remind this is running in a 'Virtual X' window. This will also effect performance.

From what I read on the Bumblebee-project wiki/git this is common issue.

Did you also test it with an other program than glxgears? Seems that glxgears sometimes doesnt show the correct FPS. (when Vsync is enabled, etc.)

Yes as I mentioned above, I tried with GLPlanet and I got a very similar result. So it seems that bumblebee is at fault then...