NVidia PowerMizer Power levels Temporary Workaround

Let’s say you finally got a new laptop and installed your favorite Linux distro on it. Only to find out that the new NVidia drivers have PowerMizer installed. Which is great for battery life, sucky for everything else. So what is PowerMizer? Straight from NVidia’s page:

As the world is faced with ever increasing demands on its resources, every opportunity to eliminate wasted power can help. NVIDIA® PowerMizer® technology is an intelligent power management solution available on all NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs) that can effectively extend battery life and reduce wasted power – all while providing performance on demand even while plugged in the wall.

Key Benefits

• Extends battery life
• Intelligently adapts performance based on a user’s needs so it saves power even when the notebook is plugged into the wall
• Runs in the background to provide the best balance of performance and battery life
• Helps the notebook run cooler and quieter under normal operating conditions by dissipating less heat in the GPU

So how do we “fix” PowerMizer so that it works correctly? Currently no solution exists as PowerMizer is a proprietary NV thing, so we have a few workarounds to get your laptop gaming at it’s best.

The site NVnews.net has a great forum post all about this problem. It’s a widespread problem with only a few plausible workarounds. Most work for most, but your milage may vary. See what works for you. Straight from the site, here are a few things that worked for me:

• Adding Option “PixmapCacheSize” “200000″ to the Device section in your xorg.conf should improve 2D quite a bit. (or “300000″, try one and the other, see what works for you)
• Option “OnDemandVBlankInterrupts” “True”

One of the best changes you can do (or so the site says) is this:

nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 -a GlyphCache=1

You will have to do that at every boot. So, easiest solution is to just stick that into a script and have it run at every boot (or login). For me, I put it into “nvfixes.sh” into my “~/.kde/Autostart/” folder. Here is my whole script:

#!/bin/bash
nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 -a GlyphCache=1

The website also states that you can change the settings in KDE to use “Shared Memory”. You can do it in the following way (in KDE 4.1 of course):

• Open System Settings
• Desktop
• Desktop Effects
• Advanced Options (Enable desktop effects has to be checked)
• Change OpenGL Mode to Shared Memory

Word of caution: Make sure DIRECT RENDERING is enable before you do that. The website claims that you will experience corruption if you do otherwise.

From my experience so far, the Shared Memory change will make KDE work a bit smoother/faster(?). But the caviet here is that it requires a lot of memory. So if you don’t have more than 2gb, it might freeze sometimes when trying to do something (ie switch desktops) because it has to reload things into memory. This never happens in the “Texture From Pixmap” mode (though this mode has it’s own problems for me).

When other fixes are found I will try to keep us updated. If anyone finds another solution, please let me know. The forum post can be found here: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=115916&highlight=powermizer

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Tagged as: intelligent power management, KDE, Linux, nvidia, nvidia drivers, powermizer, workarounds