What is there to prepare, just hit play and have fun, right ?
Well, no, it's not that simple, let me explain
If you have a weak NVIDIA graphics card just like me, for example MX350, which is for notebook laptops, you may have noticed immediately that the card is not giving it's full performance compared to windows, you may have thought, maybe gaming on Linux or Ubuntu is not yet ready for gaming or something like that and that people may have lied about getting the same performance as windows in games using proton or just lucky, or maybe they got an RTX card, if not, at least I did 😔.
Until ...
Until I tried Counter-strike 2, a native Linux game, it should run smoothly no matter what, it should even run better than windows, there is no proton layer that translates code .
It was bad, I am talking about having under 60 fps in the game, this is a native game that is meant to be played om Linux systems, what is wrong with my Ubuntu desktop or NVIDIA card ?
Turns out, it's NVIDIA, especially that NVIDIA X server settings APP, it's not about not having the latest driver, it's about the NVIDIA card not utilizing itself to max performance, I noticed that the fan speed is slow, the laptop didn't heat as much, something is wrong, in windows when I play games, the laptop sounds like a jet plane, but not on Ubuntu, why ? Hmmmm...
I tried what I know, I tested and found out that,
This is misleading :
It's not truly max performance, to explain further, read this hint :
In short
- Auto = driver picks (it will pick Adaptive most of the time)
- Adaptive = clock speed will change based on card utilization
- Prefer maximum performance = hint to the driver to do it's best
In games, prefer maximum performance, the fps fluctuates too much, it's annoying and you will lose to your enemy, I think hinting is not enough, after all, no one knows how the driver works because it a proprietary driver, that's why, I suggest to put it on auto, let the driver do it's magic and let it decide.
But that is not enough, even with this noted, it's still not the true power of my card, I tried and tested and found out that I need to do a restart with performance mode on in Ubuntu power mode options each time I want to change an NVIDIA option WHILE the laptop is plugged to the charger or it will just NOT WORK.
To summarize : you need to set NVIDIA PowerMizer settings, preferred mode to auto, plus your power mode to performance in Ubuntu then restart while the laptop is plugged to the charger, starting up with performance mode and having the laptop plugged in will get you 98% same performance as windows.
note: you can set the graphics quality for OpenGL in the NVIDIA app
see you later . 👋