Ubuntu – Reduced performance in bumblebee after 3.0 to 3.2 update

bumblebeeperformance

I had installed bumblebee 3.0 for my nVidia geforce 635M card in ubuntu 12.10 and got instant results – temp ad fan speeds reduced, batt backup extended to almost 6 hrs. (from 1.5-2 hrs earlier) and upon comparing glxspheres with and without optirun, got the fps to jump from ~60 to ~130.

But when bumblebee updated to version 3.2, I suppose it updated fine and was active, but the batt life reduced to about 4 hrs. Also optirun glxspheres gave an fps of ~60, although it did recognize the nvidia card and mentioned it in the output.

is this a bug or some limitation on 3.2? should i revert to using 3.0?, and if so, how to fix it.

PLease help as I loved the long batt backup and higher fps earlier.

Also, I saw in some post on the internet that someone got an fps in the range of 1300 – 1600 fps after starting nvidia hardware acceleration whereas I had got only 130 fps…whats the catch there?

Best Answer

Disable card on boot

These options can be useful to disable the card on boot time. in /etc/modules file can be used to load modules on boot time. Adding the below line to the file makes the card get disabled on boot:

 bbswitch load_state=0

You have to update your initial ramdisk (initrd) for the changes propagate to the boot process. On Debian and Ubuntu, this can performed by running update-initramfs -u as root.

Disable card on exit

Edit the line in /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf, Set it to true, By default it set it to false

 TurnCardOffAtExit=true

I hope this work for you ....

Also please check Is there a power saving application similar to Jupiter?

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Why does vblank_mode improve framerate drastically in benchmarks

vblank_mode=0 tells the graphic card to ignore the refresh rate of your monitor and just try to reach the maximux fps it's capable off.

You usually don't want this, because it causes tearing and wastes battery life without any benefits (you can't view more then, in your case, 60fps because your monitor isn't able to change what's displaying more than 60 times every second).

You might sometimes want this (in online shooters such as cs:go for example) because otherwise you will have a lot of input lag. It's a trade-off, input lag vs. screen tearing.

I think optirun sets vblank_mode=0 by default, so it doesn't change whether you specify it or not. primusrun doesn't and it too caps at 60 fps without vblank_mode=0.

Ubuntu – Running glmark2 with discrete graphics card: 60 fps cap

Try running

vblank_mode=0 optirun glmark2

Apparently there's a cap in place to limit the FPS to the refresh rate of the monitor.