Power consumption on Linux with the proprietary Nvidia driver

By default the proprietary driver for Nvidia cards on Linux fires an interrupt for every frame drawn on screen, whether it needs to or not. This increases power consumption. To avoid this use version 100.14.19 or later of the driver (the nvidia-glx-new package in Ubuntu 8.04 provides 169.12) and set OnDemandVBlankInterrupts to true in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. For example:

Section "Device"
Identifier      "Configured Video Device"
Driver          "nvidia"
Option          "NoLogo"        "True"
Option          "OnDemandVBlankInterrupts"      "True"
EndSection

This will reduce the time your CPU spends on spurious interrupts. Your laptop should run cooler and longer as a result.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 7:41 pm and is filed under linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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