I recently upgraded to an nVidia Geforce 570 on my machine. The card is freaking fast, but linux and the desktop environment KDE always felt a bit laggy. There animations weren’t 100% fluid. I guess I’ve lived with the issue considering it normal until I installed and played Serious Sam 3.
At the time being I’m running Ubuntu 13.10 with a custom kernel 3.12.3 and nVidia driver 331.20.
The game had serious performance issues. As soon as some action was provided the frame dropped from 80 to 20. Also tearing was unbearable. V-sync settings were ignored. Which divided the screen into three parts. Each part was showing a different game scence. It was very confusing and annoying. So a solution had to be found!
Finally I found the causer. It was the non optimal default configuration of X11, KDE and nVidia module. Following settings gave me a huge boost in performance and a lag free Serious Sam 3 and KDE:
/etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf:
options nvidia NVreg_EnableMSI=1 NVreg_EnablePCIeGen3=1
/etc/X11/xorg.conf:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Device0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
Option "TripleBuffer" "True"
EndSection
~/.profile:
export __GL_YIELD="USLEEP"
export KWIN_TRIPLE_BUFFER=1
Apply changes, reboot and rock!
benbloggt 