Arch Linux

DWilliams

Member

From: Everywhere

Registered: 2009-11-22

Posts: 119

Poor performance in every game

I have a Sony Vaio S series laptop that I'm trying to get arch fully functional on. I've  got just about everything sorted out for normal usage but it's pretty much unusable for gaming. It has hybrid graphics with an primary intel video card and a decently powerful NVIDIA secondary card. I got bumblebee/optirun set up and confirmed it's working (just by simply comparing the FPS in glxgears with and without optirun, it's significantly higher with optirun).

Any game I play, though, has basically unplayable FPS. I've tried Linux native games and games in Wine. They all run horribly even if the same game runs at a normal framerate in Windows. It's not just an issue with Wine performance being lower than native Windows performance, even ancient games like StarCraft 1 have video lag.

Where should I start trying to improve video performance on my system? This laptop seems to be rather Linux unfriendly unfortunately. I want to get everything working 100% in Linux as it does on my desktop so I can wipe my Windows partition and reclaim that space...

runny6play

Member

Registered: 2012-02-18

Posts: 85

Re: Poor performance in every game

Nvidia uses their own driver stack. The open-source Nvidia drivers are hacked together reversed engineered drivers. They're a step behind the closed source company drivers.  If you want gaming proformance I suggest seeing if your BIOS has an option to only use the discrete card and get the Nvidia binaries

DWilliams

Member

From: Everywhere

Registered: 2009-11-22

Posts: 119

Re: Poor performance in every game

My BIOS doesn't have an option to only use the NVIDIA card as far as I can see, and I'm pretty sure I'm using the proprietary NVIDIA drivers (installed via the nvidia-bumblebee package)

runny6play

Member

Registered: 2012-02-18

Posts: 85

Re: Poor performance in every game

as far as I know the bumblebee part is an open-source layer for Optimus. if you haven't already https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Bumblebee  (for some reason it wouldn't let me url tag it

DWilliams

Member

From: Everywhere

Registered: 2009-11-22

Posts: 119

Re: Poor performance in every game

Yeah I've followed the instructions on that page to get it set up. Like I said, it works in that I get better performance with bumblebee on than with it off, but the performance is still terrible overall.

brebs

Member

Registered: 2007-04-03

Posts: 3,742

Re: Poor performance in every game

See my tips in older thread.