I’ll have to look into seeing if I can mess with that! It’s a laptop 3070, so they:'ve already made some changes (fewer cores, lower boost clocks). My laptop sets a 100 W max TGP for it.

TBH though I’ve found myself caring more about the convenience of playing games (comfort, portability, ease of interrupting) more than graphics settings. Yeah it’s very pretty with ray tracing and all, but I’m totally fine with playing on medium or high.

Thanks for the ideas! Hopefully I can push the graphics up without turning into a pile of lava. I need to figure out how to record graphics power consumption for me to reference to evaluate changes.

Thanks for the ideas! Hopefully I can push the graphics up without turning into a pile of lava. I need to figure out how to record graphics power consumption for me to reference to evaluate changes.

It’s far more efficient to just TDP limit your GPU rather than lowering settings to try and get power consumption (and laptop fan speed) down. It will stick to slightly lower clocks, which is exponentially better since that also lowers voltage, and voltage increases power consumption quadratically.

Otherwise it will always try to boost to 100W anyway.

You can do this with MSI Afterburner easily, or you can do it in Windows with just the command line. For example, nvidia-smi -pl 80 will set the power limit to 80W (until you restart your PC). nvidia-smi by itself will show all its default settings.

I do this with my 3090, and dropping from the default 420W to 300W hardly drops performance at all without changing a single graphics setting.

Alternatatively you can hard cap the clocks to your GPU’s “efficient” range. For my 3090 thats somewhere around 1500-1700 MHz, and TBH I do this more often, as it wastes less power from the GPU clocking up to uselessly inefficient voltages, but lets it “power up” for really intense workloads.

FYI you can do something similar with the CPU too, though it depends on the model and platform.

Thank you very much, kind graphics wizard. I will put this knowledge to good use saving my ears from that fan. This is exactly what I was looking for!

While I was working at an MSP that was one of the talking points regarding computer upgrades, that and Windows 10 EOL looming in October

Yep. If I didn’t think it was stupider, I would almost think it was a plan to increase consumption of bs computer upgrades given how they’ve basically gotten to the point that people don’t really need to upgrade for the most part, outside of operating system changes.

Windows bloat does a pretty good job of making fairly recent computers feel sluggish though. I just updated my work laptop with a 12th gen CPU to Windows 11 and things are noticeably more sluggish immediately following applying the update. Which is sad since its about 8 years newer than my Linux laptop with similar (but older of course) specs and the Linux laptop is significantly snappier-feeling when in use.

As I promised, my own Cyberpunk testing of Windows Vs Linux on mostly the same hardware (they are on different SSDs, but I don’t think that’ll have a drastic impact).

TLDR: Windows framerates seem inconsistent, it’s first benchmark I ran (the first Ultra without DLSS) was way faster with no explanation. Aside from that and Ray Tracing: Overdrive, Linux seems to win, and by a large degree (+28 FPS average on the Low preset seems ridiculous).

I don’t think these results are broadly applicable to more machines. You probably won’t get +28 FPS by switching to Linux.

My best guess is that the performance difference may have a lot to do with different power/thermal targets, or that Windows was doing a lot in the background (it was running an update, but I didn’t expect a huge impact).

I’m guessing that on most hardware the performance difference will be pretty small.

Hardware: ROG Zephyrus G15 GA503QR Laptop Ryzen 9 5900HS, 16 GiB DDR4 RTX 3070 Laptop GPU 2560x1440 screen, up to 165 Hz

All benchmarks: plugged into OEM power supply. I held the laptop vertically so there were no restrictions to its airflow.

Game: Cyberpunk 2077 V2.3 with Phantom Liberty DLC, fullscreen 2560x1440. Values are given as Min / Average / Max FPS displayed by the game’s built in benchmark.

Linux (Bazzite 42): NVIDIA driver 575.64.05 Samsung 980 Pro 2TB SSD Performance power profile

Low Preset ( no upscaling): 57.49 / 68.42 / 83.86 FPS

Ultra Preset(no upscaling): 32.91 / 39.27 / 49.71 FPS

Ultra (DLSS Transformer model, Auto): 41.11 / 48.70 / 61.30 FPS

Ray Tracing: Low Preset (DLSS transformer model, Auto): 44.12 / 51.70 / 61.63 FPS

Ray Tracing: Ultra Preset (DLSS transformer model, Auto): 29.24 / 34.26 / 39.81 FPS

Ray Tracing: Overdrive Preset (DLSS transformer model, Auto): 15.03 / 17.71 / 20.45 FPS

Windows (Windows 11 Home 23H2): GeForce Game Ready Driver 580.88 SK Hynix HFM001TD3JX013N SSD “Turbo” power profile (in ASUS Armoury Crate)

Low Preset (no upscaling): 35.68 / 40.68 / 45.17 FPS

Ultra Preset(no upscaling): 40.53 / 52.88 / 65 FPS

Ultra Preset (no upscaling, Round 2): 29.68 / 35.63 / 39.94 FPS

Ultra (DLSS Transformer model, Auto): 36.71 / 47.20 / 55.32 FPS

Ray Tracing: Low Preset (DLSS transformer model, Auto): 28.55 / 32.41 / 35.85 FPS

Ray Tracing: Ultra Preset (DLSS transformer model, Auto): 22.23 / 27.25 / 30.86 FPS

Ray Tracing: Overdrive Preset (DLSS transformer model, Auto): 17.74 / 19.96 / 22.64 FPS

Pretty much. I have to use windows 11 for work, so I get the sluggish feeling. My 8th gen Intel laptop is much faster, despite being considerably older than my work laptop.

I just took an old Optiplex with a GTX1650 and got it going with Ubuntu 24.04 and my experience was mostly okay but I saw a number of issues which could confound a newbie. Firstly, I had to go to the command like to run the ubuntu-drivers auto install because the card wasn’t set up properly. If I hadn’t then games wouldn’t run properly. But then I was able to install Steam and get some games going. Acceleration looked okay and I tested games which were running under Windows emulation and natively with some success - however there was a long delay launching some games, like it was having to transpile shaders or something. Still, when they worked they seemed to work well.

The most egregious issue I had is that Ubuntu defaults to an X11 desktop and the desktop is slightly off but the games work well. If I change to a Wayland desktop, then the desktop is buttery smooth but the games are very choppy. I suspect that’s the driver for this old card just doesn’t work properly with the window manager for some reason in that mode, that the wm is not giving the game a proper surface to render in or is somehow interfering with performance.

Can I post a potentially controversial opinion? I think that the ‘Game Bar’ feature that Win11 has now is actually kinda good. It has really come a long, long way since Windows Gaming for PC. I think that whenever I switch to Linux, I would probably seek out something similarly as elegant.

Can I post a potentially controversial opinion?

NO, YOU CAN’T. (just kidding.)

Serious now: if I got it right, this game bar is an overlay showing FPS, CPU/GPU usage, screenshots/recording, stuff like this. It doesn’t look too hard to implement in Linux, and apparently there’s a GNOME extension in the makes for that. (If it’s compatible with Cinnamon I’ll be a happy camper. I’d rather not touch GNOME directly with a 3m pole, but the tools for GNOME are sometimes OK.)

Correct! And I appreciate the recommendation. I’m an XFCE4 man (sorry. It is just what I’ve been using for decades) and I think I could probably get that GNOME library running on that environment.

dired-mode is as good as ever