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Curious about performance of nouveau on old laptops with discrete graphics (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Got myself a Dell Latitude ~~E4310~~ E6410 and Thinkpad T510 for free, both with discrete Nvidia graphics soldered to the mainboard. I've installed Linux on them and just went with the nouveau driver since the proprietary Nvidia driver for such old cards is no longer in the Debian 12 repo. Not going to do anything cutting edge on them, but it does leave me wondering:

I read that I could, with some effort, install the proprietary driver manually. Am I missing out on anything at all without them, or is nouveau mature enough and the graphics old enough that I wouldn't notice?
Is nouveau with old discrete graphics better or worse than having just Intel's integrated graphics?
Does power consumption vary significantly between nouveau and proprietary drivers?

EDIT

Answering myself after going down a rabbit hole with the T510:

The dGPU is the NVS 3100M, which does have some level of hardware acceleration support under nouveau, so at least it isn't draining power for zero benefit. However, the dGPU is unable to go past its lowest power state without manually manipulating /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/pstate (I did not try to) and I suspect that this is what kneecaps 3D performance. There should be a marked difference, but I won't be doing any serious work on these machines, so I'm leaving everything as-is.
This situation is worse than having just integrated graphics due to the inherent power consumption of the GPU core while unable to benefit from higher power states and other optimizations.
Power consumption is probably less, but for much worse performance. At least it is a much better fallback than leaving at maximum.

A later variant has the BIOS option to disable the dGPU, mine is an early variant with no options

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (5 children)

No, you can't install the drivers manually if they aren't supported. Nvidia does rolling driver releases removing aged out hardware, and the drivers do not support new versions with older hardware. Same with Windows.
Nouveau is the only option you have as far as hardware acceleration goes, but if these are laptops, you'd be better off just using the Intel graphics, because that's what's available, and they are very power efficient.
Power consumption is immediately bad once you engage the Nvidia hardware. Disable it in the BIOS. You won't have better performance in any meaningful way, just horrible battery life, especially since these are devices so old the modern drivers won't support the hardware.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Neither laptop BIOS offers the option to disable discrete graphics :(

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Are you sure? I know the successor the T420 supports disabling the graphics. I dont think my 410 ever had it though. It's under display settings in the bios. Not sure about dell though, they might not have had it.

https://download.lenovo.com/bsco/index.html#/textsimulator/ThinkPad%20W530%20(2447,2436,2438,2439,2441,2449,2463)

Lenovo's bios simulator sadly only goes as old as the T530. But it's config > display > graphics device.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Unfortunately, I'm only given a choice between Boot Display Devices under that menu.

edit: Apparently, there is a menu for it if the T510 is a later model with Optimus support. Early dGPU variants like mine are forced to use the discrete graphics, even if the BIOS is hacked to reveal the menu.

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