poor performance of nvidia driver

[Chogan]

i have a hp pavilion dv2500 notebook with nvidia Geforce 8400M Gs as graphic card.
i installed ubuntu 12.04 on it. everything is ok but nvidia driver.
when i installed nvidia graphic driver, performance reduced: unity became slow, firefox scrolling became slow and same thing happened for pdf reader. also boot time is longer.
i never had such a expectation, in fact my expectation was completely vise vera. i expected nvidia driver performance be better than nouveau.
now i'm using nouveau. in unity 2d it is ok but i cannot use unity 3d using nouveau in ubuntu 12.04.
who know what is the problem with my nvidia graphic driver? how can i solve that?
i installed that using "Additional Drivers".
i had same problem with nvidia driver in openSUSE also.

[Pjotr123]

Which version of the restricted nvidia driver did you install? There are several versions available in the repositories.

[Chogan]

i cannot remember the exact version number. but i dare say i tried several nvidia versions in ubuntu and openSUSE and all of them caused to this problem.

[Pjotr123]

You can check the version if you install Synaptic:

sudo apt-get install synaptic

You can use Synaptic for changing the driver. First try nvidia-current, then nvidia-173, then nvidia-current-updates and maybe finally even nvidia-experimental-304 and nvidia-experimental-310.

Stay with the driver that performs best, and only try the experimentals if there is really no good alternative.

If you lose display because of a driver change, you can repair it as follows:
https://sites.google.com/site/easyli...isplay-at-all-
(item 1, left column)

[Chogan]

as i explained, its several mounts that i using free open source driver (nouveau).
i tested both current and experimental nvidia drivers in ubuntu and openSUSE and i had the problem in all situations.
it is useful if look at my description about this problem in openSUSE forums too. here is the address.

[Pjotr123]

It appears to be a 5 year old computer, with an Nvidia card that has only 64 MB dedicated RAM. You shouldn't expect too much 3D performance...

I advise to install the Nvidia restricted driver again (the one Ubuntu advises is best, probably in your case the "current"), and stay with a 2D desktop. Like Unity 2D, or even better: my own personal favourite Xubuntu:
https://sites.google.com/site/easyli...roject/xubuntu

You can even transform your existing Ubuntu installation into Xubuntu:
https://sites.google.com/site/easyli...ct/alternative

If you apply some speed tweaks, your computer will fly:
https://sites.google.com/site/easyli...sproject/speed

Afterwards, test the performance (FPS rate) of your Nvidia like this:

glxgears

(you may need to install mesa-utils first)

Good luck and happy 2013!

[mdrag13]

Hi,

I've been using Ubuntu for a couple of years on a PC that is not "the last state of the art" machine (aprox. +3y old). Since the Unity first appeared I've had problems with graphics rendering which resulted in a slow (and occasionally unresponsive) 3D GUI (switching to Unity 2D made things a lot better). My config is the following:

MSI K9N6PGM2-V2 MBO
AMD Athlon II X2 240 @ 2.8GHz
2 GB TakeMS DDR2 @ 800MHz
500GB Western Digital WD500AAKS HD
NVidia Geforce 6150SE nForce 430

I've tried instaling various NVidia drivers (via Ubuntu's drivers repo and manually from NVidia website), changing graphic settings and a lot of similar experiments but nothing helped - 3D Unity was simply slow and lagging. As you can see, my graphic card isn't something to be proud of, so the whole thing didn't actually bother me much (you can't race a F1 in a minicar with 60hp ).

So, I've been using Unity 2D since a couple weeks ago, when I decided to give this issue a "one last try" to fix. I managed to get a fully functional 3D Unity (without the lags, slowness, etc.) by changing this feature in my BIOS: "VGA Share Memory". Since my graphic card is integrated on my MBO, earlier I configured it to use the max. shared memory available (256MB). When I reduced it to the minimum (32MB) the whole thing blossomed - Unity appeared to be fast and responsive. I've tried it with NVidia 173 drivers available via Ubuntu repos and with drivers that I downloaded directly from NVidia (v173.14.36), which I'm using right now, and everything looks ok ..

Now, why is this option (obviously) important and why did it bring so much performance upgrade - beats me (I can't think of any tehnically "legal" answer, hopefully someone will eventually come up with some explanation) ..

Anyway, I tought it was worth mentioning, maybe this'll be useful to someone ..

[johnnerpb]

Thanks have the same mobo and cpu thought all was lost till i read this!!