I did some experiments because you asked if it was possible to get “Powemizer” to start at maximum performance, after some google plus tries I found this:
I have 3 different Performance Levels available in my settings (might be other for you) and if I change my “/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-device.conf” to this, the level never change from what I want (I want it to be automagical so I don’t use it myself).
With this performance level my card never leave “Performance Level 2”, might help you with sluggish gfx.
That’s interesting too. This is my 50-device.conf file…pretty sparse. Where did you get the idea to put that there?
# Having multiple "Device" sections is known to be problematic. Make
# sure you don't have in use another one laying around e.g. in another
# xorg.conf.d file or even a generic xorg.conf file. More details can
# be found in https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32430.
#
#Section "Device"
# Identifier "Default Device"
#
# #Driver "radeon"
#
# ## Required magic for radeon/radeonhd drivers; output name
# ## (here: "DVI-0") can be figured out via 'xrandr -q'
# #Option "monitor-DVI-0" "Default Monitor"
#
#EndSection
missed that you asked why I put it in that file… I don’t use a xorg.conf file on this desktop computer so all the “Section” parts from xorg.conf reside in that directory “/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d”
If you use a xorg.conf file for some reason put it in the /Section “Device”/
And if you just want the max powwa part just use this:
Here’s something I find troubling. This is an excerpt from a Smolt probe. Notice the two display entries. One for my onboard and one for my nvidia card. Also note the PCI bridge driver** “NONE”.** Something is not right I suspect. Even with my nvidia card setting to max performance, firefox does not scroll web pages smoothly. Video overall should be faster and smoother on this system. I should be able to play youtube vids in full screen mode. My CPU is working too hard. The graphics card is not working hard enough. Something is fundamentally not right.
I think that PCI/PCI bridge driver is supported by the Kernel, so that being listed as “NONE” shouldn’t be a problem. Why you have Intel Graphics present is stranger, that should be automatically disabled by Bios if there is a PCI-E card in place… thats my understanding at least.
Is there no Bios update available, does the Intel card work if you plug in a monitor?
I wonder if the display resolution of your monitor might have something to do with this, as the GT 430 is a not considered a high-end NVIDIA card. You mentioned youtube videos - have you got the DownloadHelper add-on installed in firefox? Maybe you could try downloading first, then playing back as mpeg or flv etc. I’m wondering if this is more related to flash video?
Maybe you could test your graphics card using the Phoronix Test Suite
Funny you should ask this. I just tried it. I did not get any display, although I did leave the BIOS setting at “auto”. Oh, and the nvidia card is straight PCI, not PCI-Express. Kinda a rare bird seeing as how it was manufactured just last year.
Edit - PCI can be a big bottle neck for video and for basic screen redraws.
How much RAM ? I discovered on my nVidia 8400 GS which was a PCI (before I gave it away) that simple scrolling and moving windows was SLOW with PCI. What was fast was videos with VDPAU. I note my 8400 GS had something like 800MB of RAM on the card. Having 1 GB would have been better, as I struggled with 1920x1080 videos. Having lots of RAM on the graphic card is important if one wishes to take advantage of vdpau. If one has only 256MB or 512MB on the PCI graphic card, then I would expect difficulty with full screen HD video from youtube and other sites that can provide HD video.
I just wonder did you do a fresh install with the nVIDIA card in place or is it an older install from when you just had the integrated gfx?
I’m just puzzled because if the Bios vga switch was set to auto there shouldn’t be an Intel video.
I don’t think there is any better chipset drivers from Intel beside those already in the Kernel.
Well, PCI is my only option for this box. In the past, I’ve run cards with as low as 64MB of RAM and they did okay. This has 512MB DDR3, a 700MHz Core Clock, 1200/1400MHz Memory Clock, with DirectX Compute, OpenGL 4.0 and supports Linux on the box. So it’s no slouch. I expect better performance with it. I do suspect a bottleneck somewhere, but not with the card itself or the nVidia driver. With this hardware, Linux should run faster/better than MS Windows (which is what the box came pre-installed with back in the day). There’s an issue somewhere and it’s a detective’s game to figure out what it is.
Exactly. It puzzles me too. This is a fresh install with the nVidia card installed and BIOS set to “auto”, the only other option being to have the on-board video set to “on”.
I doubt that those were PCI cards playing full screen HD videos. I believe they may have been AGP cards playing low quality videos full screen. The difference is night and day. There was a time when 480p on Youtube was unheard of, and 240p was more common.
Please, don’t take this the wrong way, but I beg to differ.
If you want the best graphic performance, then MS-Windows (winXP in your case) is still the faster OS with graphics in mind.
No, exactly the opposite (re: winXP).
Note I have not used MS-Windows as my main PC at home since 1998. BUT I do track the graphic drivers, and the MS-Windows graphic drivers for nVidia, AMD, and mostly Intel are significantly superior to those of GNU/Linux. Typically from 2x to 5x superior performance from MS-Windows graphics drivers. Yes, that much. But don’t believe me on this, instead go to Phoronix or other sites which do such comparisons, and post back here any links you find contrary to that.
The problem here is the PCI bus is a major bottle neck. Any graphic traffic to/from that bus will be slow. If an entire frame can not be passed from the CPU to the GPU for decoding then there will be traffic to/from the PCI bus and the PC will grind to a crawl even with VDPAU selected. Without VDPAU this will simply crawl due to the PCI bus.
Speaking of which have you selected VDPAU ? Are the videos you are playing back using VDPAU (to offload the video processing from CPU to GPU). Note that does NOT happen by default.
Check to see if your card is supported: Nvidia PureVideo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (where vdpau is the GNU/Linux version of Pure Video for Windows), where I think the GT 430 is supported. Note VDPAU will only help in the playback of some video codecs. Not all codecs. Also, only a small number of GNU/Linux apps will support VDPAU. Not all apps. Indeed not the majority of apps. VDPAU will NOT help in the redraw/move of Windows nor scrolling of Windows on the desktop. Those will remain slow.
An example:
I had two old PCs:
32-bit athlon-1100 with 512MB of RAM and an ancient nVidia FX5200 AGP graphic card (with 256MB of RAM on video card)
32-bit athlon-2800 with 2GB of RAM and a new nVidia 8400GS PCI (not PCI-e) graphic card with 876MB of RAM (approx).
With same openSUSE version/configuration on both PCs, and both with latest proprietary driver from nVidia (albeit drivers were different due to hardware) and the ancient AGP FX5200 beat the pants off of the PCI 8400GS in basic redraw of windows, smoothness of scrolling, etc … Why ? Because the PCI bus was a MAJOR bottle neck compared to the faster AGP bus.
The only area where the faster cpu athlon-2800 with the nVidia 8400GS was faster, was when using VDPAU for playback of HD videos. But due to the 876MB of RAM NOT being large enough, this speed difference was superior only up to high bit rate 720p videos. When I tried to play high bit rate 1080p videos the 8400GS slowed down and video lagged the audio. Of course the FX5200 could not play back any HD videos.
