Nvidia Optimus

[MultiVerseCoder]

Hello,

 

A week ago I bought my new MSI laptop (cost me $4000) and I was baffled to see that there was lag when opening control panel, the settings panel, display settings, etc. I thought the windows installation might have been the culprit but after completely reinstalling the OS it was still there. After this weird behaviour I decided to go and investigate this annoying issue.

 

So the first logical thing to do would be to remove and reinstall the graphics driver. At this point I noticed that whenever I removed the nvidia driver the stutter would be gone. After reading a bit more about the nvidia drivers I noticed somethin interesting, Nvidia Optimus.

 

Nvidia Optimus is a computer GPU switching technology created by Nvidia which, depending on the resource load generated by client software applications, will seamlessly switch between two graphics adapters within a computer system in order to provide either maximum performance or minimum power draw from the system's graphics rendering hardware.

 

So what this basically means is that the GPU would be disabled when it isnt used, for laptops this would make sense as keeping the GPU running would destroy your battery life. But because the GPU is in a low power state or completely turned of it needs to enable itself again for the required task. Because it needs to load up first it creates this stutter. When I searched for people describing the same problem I noticed that a lot of people have contacted Microsoft / Intel / Nvidia about this problem, they simply havent considered it to be a 'worthy' bug to fix.

 

On the contrary, Intel has said to be working on a fix but has never really responded to this issue: https://communities.intel.com/thread/119093

I have also noticed that a few other guys on this forum are describing this exact issue:

The list just keeps growing and growing yet the people responsible have neither confirmed the issue nor have they provided a fix.

 

Just imagine that you bought a laptop of $4000 and the screen stutters when opening the settings panel, control panel, chrome, firefox, photoshop, basically any GPU enabled program.

 

Linus, for the love of god, give your opinion on this atrocious issue.

[Anghammarad]

Got optimus running on my Acer for ~700 €... well only a 7th generation I5 and a MX 150, but no stutters at all... 

 

I would think it is a MSI issue...  like mismatched components generating driver issues with another.

[Klemmbrett]

My Laptop has an nvidia card also and same option save power with internal intel GPU or give me power from GPU and draw your battery faster however in my version i can decide what to do cant you do the same in Control Panel ? At-least it does in the Linux Driver version there only 2 options to tick "intel power saving mode" (aka GPU disabled/turned off) and "Nvidia Performance Mode"(aka GPU on). At mine it requires me to reboot to make the change might be something specific from the new series i guess 10 series chips ? 

[WereCatf]

29 minutes ago, MultiVerseCoder said:

So what this basically means is that the GPU would be disabled when it isnt used, for laptops this would make sense as keeping the GPU running would destroy your battery life. But because the GPU is in a low power state or completely turned of it needs to enable itself again for the required task.

 

It seems you've totally misunderstood what Optimus does. When the NVIDIA GPU is off, the system uses the Intel iGPU instead -- it doesn't constantly turn the NVIDIA GPU on and off. Basically, the NVIDIA GPU kicks in when anything using DirectX, OpenGL or Vulkan is running, but iGPU is running anything else. As for why you have stutters, I wouldn't know; Optimus works perfectly fine on my laptop.

[MultiVerseCoder]

48 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

It seems you've totally misunderstood what Optimus does. When the NVIDIA GPU is off, the system uses the Intel iGPU instead -- it doesn't constantly turn the NVIDIA GPU on and off. Basically, the NVIDIA GPU kicks in when anything using DirectX, OpenGL or Vulkan is running, but iGPU is running anything else. As for why you have stutters, I wouldn't know; Optimus works perfectly fine on my laptop.

Do you have windows 10 build 1703 / 1709? Also, id like to note that this only happens with Pascal mobile GPU's (10 series, 1060, 1070, 1080).

[WereCatf]

1 minute ago, MultiVerseCoder said:

Do you have windows 10 build 1703 / 1709? Also, id like to note that this only happens with Pascal mobile GPU's (10 series).

I do have up-to-date Windows, yes, but my laptop's got the older Maxwell-series NVIDIA GPU (GTX970M)

[porina]

Not sure I have any ideas to help, but I found it interesting enough to look up on it. It does seem like reports are mostly regarding 10 series GPUs. I dug out my 970M Optmius laptop, and that seems fine. (whatever latest Win10 is, latest nvidia driver, and I just updated intel too as it was released 2 days ago).

 

With nothing else to lose, wonder if the performance setting in nvidia driver helps at all? By default I think it is auto, but you can steer the preference. As further thought, does it help at all if you turn down the eye candy in Windows? I personally turn off the animation effects on the UI as they're a time waste.

[MultiVerseCoder]

28 minutes ago, porina said:

Not sure I have any ideas to help, but I found it interesting enough to look up on it. It does seem like reports are mostly regarding 10 series GPUs. I dug out my 970M Optmius laptop, and that seems fine. (whatever latest Win10 is, latest nvidia driver, and I just updated intel too as it was released 2 days ago).

 

With nothing else to lose, wonder if the performance setting in nvidia driver helps at all? By default I think it is auto, but you can steer the preference. As further thought, does it help at all if you turn down the eye candy in Windows? I personally turn off the animation effects on the UI as they're a time waste.

I have tried that and that does work, but turning down animations just to fix a bug in windows doesnt really seem the way to go. The stutter however still persists when opening chrome. Furthermore, this stutter might not seem like a big deal but it freezes your screen for like ~300 ms in which you are not able to type or move your mouse, which really sucks.

[porina]

15 minutes ago, MultiVerseCoder said:

Furthermore, this stutter might not seem like a big deal but it freezes your screen for like ~300 ms in which you are not able to type or move your mouse, which really sucks.

I do understand it is a big deal, and have encountered the symptoms before, but not in an Optimus context. Did you also try the performance setting in nvidia driver?

 

One was Corsair's software that lets you adjust various things in their ecosystem. Some versions didn't like certain hardware combinations, and you get a glitch every second or so while it updated readings via USB. Just a moment ago I got a new one. It only happens when CPU-Z is running, and I'm sure it didn't used to do that on that system. The only change I did recently is replace GPU and install the AMD blockchain driver. Maybe the two are conflicting somehow... but it is annoying as the mouse glitches every second or so for a moment. As a mining and general compute note, I'm gonna leave it for now since I don't need CPU-Z running all the time.