I’ve inherited a laptop running Intel and a Nvidia MX150 (2gb)

My experience so far is terrible. I’ve got GTAV installed and set to use the card and the performance is a stuttering, input lag, tearing mess.

Most of my research points to a lack of Vulkan support on the card.

Would this perform better on Windows? 😓

I wanted to use this machine specifically to run GTAV.

The Intel gfx, under Debian, are capable of running Stray on minimum, with zero issues.

But GTAV, even on minimum, is still stuttering. Like 6fps.

And No Man’s Sky, on Nvidia, is even worse than GTAV. On Intel, it’s almost as bad.

I’m pretty bummed… Is this card only usable in Windows? Or is it just a bad card (not broken)?

  • Dandroid@dandroid.app
    3·
    1 year ago

    Afaik, MX150 is extremely entry level. It’s like the laptop version of a 1030. My wife has a laptop with an MX250, and she basically uses it for playing visual novel games or 2D games only.

    Though 6FPS on minimum for a 10 year old game is lower than I would expect. I wouldn’t be surprised if it performed better on Windows, but I probably wouldn’t expect any higher than 30fps on low.

    • Benjamin@lemmings.worldOPEnglish
      11·
      1 year ago

      I keep reading that anything below the 2000 series has severe Vulkan limitations… I’m wondering if Windows would perform better? Playable?

      I’ve got no clue about video cards, let alone on Linux. I just know I prefer my Debian devices, and this is my first foray into Nvidia and Linux.

      Edit: and I assume an MX250 is a 2000 series. Which makes the cut for Vulkan support fwir

      • Dandroid@dandroid.app
        2·
        1 year ago

        Oh, my wife’s is on Windows. Sorry, I didn’t mention that. My point was don’t expect to play Starfield on it or anything. It’s very entry level. Older games, 2D games, and very low settings might make things playable.

  • simple@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Are you sure you’re using the official Nvidia drivers and not Noveau? What does it say when you write nvidia-smi in the terminal?

    Either way, it is a pretty old and weak card, but it should run better than 6fps on gtav.

    • Benjamin@lemmings.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      It identifies and loads up the interface.

      One process, Xorg @ 4MiB

      I’ve got the right click to use card menu, and use that to force flatpak Steam to use it. Then I confirm in game it is selected.

      It feels like a huge step down from Intel gfx on an older laptop running Windows…

  • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
    1·
    1 year ago

    What laptop is it exactly? I’ve got that card in my Thinkpad T580 and it sucks big time. Not because of the card itself or because of Linux but because it has some insane thermal targets more or less hardcoded in the firmware.

    Technically it’s fine. It has Vulkan support. It can run Doom 2016 at 30 fps. But as soon as it starts thermal throttling (and it does so very quickly) it clocks down to the lowest value. That way it even struggles to run Quake 3 at more than 6 or so fps.

    Having it on battery power can sometimes get it working for half an hour or so. But sooner or later it will get too hot and only stopping the demanding process for a few minutes will get it to cool down enough.

      • Benjamin@lemmings.worldOPEnglish
        21·
        1 year ago

        Just can’t change any of the graphic settings without it crashing.

        Running at 1280x720 at 60fps

        All lowest settings though. Good enough.

        • Cornelius@lemmy.ml
          1·
          1 year ago

          Have you perchance installed the proprietary drivers? The open source drivers aren’t any good

  • HarriPotero@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    Do you have an iGPU as well?

    If that’s the case, the mx150 needs to copy over the framebuffer to that one when you use the internal display. Performance can improve with an external display, but don’t expect wonders.

  • dark_stang@beehaw.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    There were apparently 2 different MX150 chips with very different power consumption (10w vs 25w), core clocks (937mhz vs 1468mhz), and memory bandwidth (40GB/s vs 48GB/s). I don’t think either of these are going to play GTA5 well, but the 10w part is probably much worse. Can you confirm which one you’ve got?

    • Benjamin@lemmings.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I dunno…

      But I switched to proton 6.x and dx10 and now it’s running, even if it crashes trying to change the settings.

      Now I’ve got to figure out installing mods for single player… Using flatpak…

  • hperrin@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    That is a very low power entry level mobile card. You will need to run everything at low preset, probably max of 720p resolution.

    That card is less powerful than the 1650 Max-Q, which is relatively modern mobile entry level: https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-MX150-0-vs-Nvidia-GTX-1650-Mobile-Max-Q/m332822vsm790279

    I don’t know if the nouveau driver supports Vulkan on this, nor the nvidia driver, but if they don’t, then yes, you’ll get better performance on Windows.