Forcing nVidia PowerMizer Performance Levels
I’ve recently had opportunity to install Fedora on Dell Precision M4300 laptop. It has pretty powerful nVidia Quadro FX 360M video adapter with 512MB of video memory. However, desktop 3D effects sometimes were not very smooth, especially after some time of inactivity. The first few movements (like cube rotation, dragging windows) seemed to be quite lazy in response for the first few seconds, but later it is getting very smooth. The reason behind that is video adapter’s GPU being stepped down to the lowest performance level after some time of inactivity. Once desktop got busy again – performance level jumped up, and effects were smooth again. Simple as that, and it can be easily monitored via nVidia X Server Settings utility, in PowerMizer section. Of course, there is a solution for that.
The obvious point is to tell nVidia that it should use PowerMizer performance level 2 at all times, forcing GPU to run at maximum speed, and saving user from horrible desktop experience. To do that, we need to add following lines into /etc/modprobe.conf:
options nvidia NVreg_RegistryDwords="PerfLevelSrc=0x2222" options nvidia NVreg_Mobile=1
Rebooting computer should bring you into hassle free and beautiful 3D desktop world.
Source:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=108912
Special credits:
matulka.net — for checking that out while I was being lazy ;)