Yet Another Nvidia Performance Issue (YANPI)

Hi everyone! First post here so excuse if I post this under a wrong category. Also excuse my english.
Straight to the point, I've been using my laptop with Gnome and Compiz Fusion for a while and until not long ago everything was working perfectly smooth and all. I don't know if it is related to an upgrade or what but I didn't change any configuration. The problem itself is that all the 3D rendering is done by the CPU even though Nvidia Performance Level goes to Level 2 (Nvidia 8400M, NV GPU Clock 400 MHz, NV RAM Clock 400 MHz). Glxgears shows a performance of at least 1300 FPS but the processor level goes to 80% (Core 2 duo). I went to System Monitor and I saw that glxgears was eating one of my processors and part of the other.
Here are some facts:
Direct rendering is on (glxinfo | grep direct)
nvidia-settings -q GPUCurrentPerfMode -t returns 1 while glxgears is running (2D Mode rendering)
nvidia-settings -q GPUCurrentPerfLevel -t returns 2 while glxgears is running (Nvidia Performance Level)
nvidia driver version: 190.42
xorg.conf says:
Section "Module"
    Load           "dbe"
    Load           "extmod"
    Load           "type1"
    Load           "freetype"
    Load           "glx"
    Load       "synaptics"
EndSection
Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Device0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
    BoardName      "GeForce 8400M GS"
    Option       "RegistryDwords" "PowerMizerLevel=0x2"
    Option       "Coolbits" "1"
    Option       "TripleBuffer" "True"
    Option       "NoLogo" "True"
    Option       "RenderAccel" "True"
    Option       "DamageEvents" "True"
EndSection
Section "Extensions"
    Option      "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection
Well, I guess that's the important stuff. Again, this problem started without me touching anything so I would assume it was a pacman upgrade issue. I will appreciate any help on this matter. Thanks in advance.

... Compiz has always used up a lot of CPU usage, but that's not an indicator that the graphic card not doing the rendering.
The 60 fps glxgears you see is probably vertical synchronized one and that's why it doesn't eat CPU, but understand this, in complicated graphical application there is a lot of work for the CPU, not just the GPU, and the latter often results bottlenecked by the former. Read a random CPU review/benchmark on the Internet and you'll see how different CPUs result in different frame rate in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky or WoW for example, but in Games like Crysis different CPUs don't affect the framerate, because the game is too heavy on the GPU for the CPU to have influence. It's completely normal for Compiz and X to eat up 50% CPU during effects, it's just the way they are designed to work, and don't search for a problem with your graphic's card.

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    │ │▒▒│ │ │ │
    < │▒▒│ │ │ │
    < │▒▒│ │ │ │
    < │▒▒│ │ │ │
    < │▒▒│ │ │ │
    < │▒▒│ │ │ │
    < │▒▒│ │ │ │
    < │▒▒│ │ │ │
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    │ │▒▒│ │ │ │
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    Johan
    Last edited by 6feet5 (2013-01-08 19:03:50)

    WonderWoofy wrote:@srs5694, have you thought about filing a bug report/feature request about the naming scheme here?  I would imagine that something coming directly from the upstream developer would be something that they should take into consideration.  Also, I imagine that renaming it to refindx64.efi kind of goes against the whole "vanilla packages" thing we tout around here... so it really makes me wonder why it is done in the first place.
    I've just done that:
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    It's not been very important until recently; but I've been putting a lot of effort into the ancillary support scripts (install.sh and mvrefind.sh). They necessarily rely on the files having certain names, so installing them under other names robs users of functionality.
    6feet5 wrote:I've decided to try and restore the whole unit, thinking it would take maybe an hour or two. It's been running now for almost 3 hours and only completed 20%.
    Good luck with that!
    FWIW, it seems that the number of EFI-related bug reports on Linux forums has gone way up recently. No doubt this is because EFI is now pretty much universal on new computers, so problems that used to affect one or two people now affect dozens or hundreds, and some of those post about them.

  • Yet another nvidia thread

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    I just installed the NVIDIA drivers on my fresh install of Arch yesterday and I am also running the 2.6.4 kernel.  I looked previous to installing to see if there was any documentation and I didn't see any either so I decided to go ahead and write some!
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