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SacmanXman2

Member

Registered: 2016-12-16

Posts: 4

Nvidia graphics card but low performance

I have two computers.
On one (a desktop), I have a dedicated Nvidia graphics card. Specifically a GTX 560SE, which has 288 CUDA cores and 1GB of VRAM.
On my other device (an Acer laptop), I have hybrid Intel-NVidia graphics set up with bumblebee. The card on that is a Nvidia 940MX, which in theory should be roughly 2x as powerful as my desktop card, considering that it has 512 CUDA cores and 2GB of VRAM. For whatever reason, performance is less than a quarter what it is on my other computer in various games (Modded Minecraft, Red Eclipse, etc.). I did a GLMark2 benchmark on both devices, and my desktop gave me a nice score of 5254, while my laptop gave me a measly 169. I have both drivers up to date (both running the Nvidia-375 drivers).

I noticed that when I run sudo lspci -v -s 01:00.0 (the pci slot) on my laptop, it shows my card as only having 256MB of VRAM. I read another thread where something similar was happening, but in nvidia-settings it also displayed the same number, whereas in my case nvidia-settings shows it as 2048MB of memory. I think this might have something to do with it.

Do I have something set up wrong with bumblebee/optimus/etc.? I did a lot of wiki searching, but a lot of this graphics terminology can go over my head when it's talking about hybrid graphics.

Thanks for any help in advance!!

jaergenoth

Member

Registered: 2015-01-16

Posts: 85

Re: Nvidia graphics card but low performance

GTX 560SE is 40% to 200% faster (depending on the situation) than 940MX.
Something might be wrong with your setup as 940MX shouldn't be that much slower(?), even with the performance loss from bumblebee.

Edit:
If you want to do some serious gaming on a laptop, you will need at least something like GTX 960M or equal.
To give you some numbers, GTX 960M is 20% to 40% faster than GTX 560SE.

Last edited by jaergenoth (2016-12-16 13:23:07)