Nouveau Driver Remains Much Slower Than NVIDIA's Official Driver

[MrAli]

as phoronix tests show, Nvidia binary driver is much better than nouveau for all nvidia graphic cards. but i have a strange problem with nvidia binary driver in my laptop (hp pavilion dv2500 with NVIDIA Geforce 8400m GS card).

the problem is that my laptop works good with nouveau driver in ubuntu 12.04 with unity 2d; but when i activate nvidia binary driver to enhance the performance and to use unity 3d, the performance shrinks severely, in fact, performance of my laptop with nvidia driver is much weaker than nouveau. for example when i run "glxgears" command in ubuntu with nouveau driver, the resaults are almost between 320 to 420 but if i run same command when nvidia binary driver is activated, the resaults shrink severely and are almost between 50 to 63. i had this problem in both ubuntu and befor that in openSUSE. also i tried different versions of Nvidia binary drivers but the problem exist with all of them.

i tried to solve this problem with asking about it in ubuntu forums (here), openSUSE forums (here) and many other linux forums but unfortunately i found nothing useful.

So, here is my last chance to find what is the problem with my graphic card and how solve that. please help me.
thank you.

[MrAli]

as phoronix tests show, Nvidia binary driver is much better than nouveau for all nvidia graphic cards. but i have a strange problem with nvidia binary driver in my laptop (hp pavilion dv2500 with NVIDIA Geforce 8400m GS card).

the problem is that my laptop works good with nouveau driver in ubuntu 12.04 with unity 2d; but when i activate nvidia binary driver to enhance the performance and to use unity 3d, the performance shrinks severely, in fact, performance of my laptop with nvidia driver is much weaker than nouveau. for example when i run "glxgears" command in ubuntu with nouveau driver, the resaults are almost between 320 to 420 but if i run same command when nvidia binary driver is activated, the resaults shrink severely and are almost between 50 to 63. i had this problem in both ubuntu and befor that in openSUSE. also i tried different versions of Nvidia binary drivers but the problem exist with all of them.

i tried to solve this problem with asking about it in ubuntu forums (here), openSUSE forums (here) and many other linux forums but unfortunately i found nothing useful.

So, here is my last chance to find what is the problem with my graphic card and how solve that. please help me.
thank you.

[misiu_mp]

. for example when i run "glxgears" command in ubuntu with nouveau driver, the resaults are almost between 320 to 420 but if i run same command when nvidia binary driver is activated, the resaults shrink severely and are almost between 50 to 63.

Do you see performance drop elsewhere (e.g. choppy games)? glxgears is not a benchmark and can't be used to give even a rough comparison between different drivers. In your case it looks like it might be syncing with your screen refresh rate (VSYNC).

[tuke81]

as phoronix tests show, Nvidia binary driver is much better than nouveau for all nvidia graphic cards. but i have a strange problem with nvidia binary driver in my laptop (hp pavilion dv2500 with NVIDIA Geforce 8400m GS card).

the problem is that my laptop works good with nouveau driver in ubuntu 12.04 with unity 2d; but when i activate nvidia binary driver to enhance the performance and to use unity 3d, the performance shrinks severely, in fact, performance of my laptop with nvidia driver is much weaker than nouveau. for example when i run "glxgears" command in ubuntu with nouveau driver, the resaults are almost between 320 to 420 but if i run same command when nvidia binary driver is activated, the resaults shrink severely and are almost between 50 to 63. i had this problem in both ubuntu and befor that in openSUSE. also i tried different versions of Nvidia binary drivers but the problem exist with all of them.

i tried to solve this problem with asking about it in ubuntu forums (here), openSUSE forums (here) and many other linux forums but unfortunately i found nothing useful.

So, here is my last chance to find what is the problem with my graphic card and how solve that. please help me.
thank you.

What misiu_mp says. And using unity 3d will effect performance, are there any difference when using binary plop in unity 2d?

And make sure that you are really using binary driver: glxinfo | grep -i -A 5 -B 5 NVIDIA

Oh and what version of driver are you using: cat /proc/driver/nvidia/version
There was performance issues at least some of 295.xx branch drivers.

[MrAli]

What misiu_mp says. And using unity 3d will effect performance, are there any difference when using binary plop in unity 2d?
And make sure that you are relly using binary driver: glxinfo | grep -i -A 5 -B 5 NVIDIA
Oh and what version of driver are you using: cat /proc/driver/nvidia/version
There was performance issues at least some of 295.xx branch drivers.

Do you see performance drop elsewhere (e.g. choppy games)? glxgears is not a benchmark and can't be used to give even a rough comparison between different drivers. In your case it looks like it might be syncing with your screen refresh rate (VSYNC).

i have this problem in both unity 2d and 3d. also i had same problem in openSUSE and KDE. i tried many nvidia binary versions 173, 295, 304 etc but the problem did not solve.