[ltp] Intel UHD Graphics 620 vs Nvidia MX150?

[Rubin Abdi]

Thanks for your advice, because of it I opted to go with the Intel solution.

Thanks again.

On 8 March 2018 at 15:56, Kevin Locke <kevin at kevinlocke.name> wrote:

> On Thu, 2018-03-08 at 10:56 -0800, Rubin Abdi wrote:
> > I'm thinking of buying a T480s, and am wondering if anyone here has
> > thoughts on running either the Intel UHD Graphics 620 or Nvidia MX150?
> >
> > I run Debian Sid. I haven't really had much of a desire to do any sort of
> > heavy gaming on my laptop, but have started playing more with WebGL stuff
> > (particularly Fusion 360 in the browser). I often need to start up a
> > Windows VM to verify some cross browser things for work.
>
> I don't have any advice on the T480/T480s specifically, but I am
> running Debian testing on a T430 which has both an Intel HD Graphics
> 4000 and NVIDIA NVS 5400M (with nVidia Optimus) so I'll provide a few
> thoughts.
>
> > Anyhow, I guess my questions are, is one GPU more of a pain under linux
> > than the other, and is the performance gain from the MX150 noticeable
> > enough?
>
> With the exception of a BIOS-related X2APIC issue on boot[1] which
> appears when enabling the nVidia card, and lack of decent support for
> Optimus[2], I haven't had any significant pains.  They do have the
> typical Intel/nVidia trade-offs:
>
> - nVidia driver supports CUDA, both support OpenCL.
> - nVidia driver supports VDPAU/NVDEC, Intel driver supports VA-API
>   (some gallium drivers support VDPAU and either can be used as a
>   backend for the other at some performance cost, as I understand.)
> - Different OpenGL vendor extensions between nVidia binary driver and
>   Mesa.
>
> The nVidia binary drivers have higher performance at the cost of
> tainting the kernel, lagging support for APIs introduced by the
> open-source DRM/X.org drivers, and all the costs that generally come
> with closed-source software.  I'm not aware of any major pain points
> currently.  All drivers seem well-supported by applications.
>
> I generally disable the nVidia card in the BIOS to conserve battery,
> since I only use it when playing FPS games, which is rare.  The Intel
> card can even do that to some degree (very low settings on semi-recent
> games), and it does fine with less demanding 3D apps like WorldWind,
> Google Earth, and the WebGL Experiments[3][4].  I haven't seen any
> performance issues with video decoding or other non-3D uses.
>
> I have tried enabling 3D acceleration in VirtualBox a few times over
> the years and found that it generally had too many issues
> (particularly stability and screen corruption issues) to be workable.
> I wouldn't recommend it.  Dual booting works fine, of course.
>
> Cheers,
> Kevin
>
> 1.  https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56051
> 2.  There is https://www.bumblebee-project.org/ and the native support
>     keeps improving, but both are still less preferable than
>     enabling/disabling the cards in the BIOS for my typical uses.
> 3.  https://experiments.withgoogle.com/chrome?tag=WebGL
> 4.  Note: My Intel card lacks GL_ARB_gpu_shader5 so can't run some
>     experiments.
>



-- 
Rubin
rubin at starset.net
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