this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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Curious about performance of nouveau on old laptops with discrete graphics (lemmy.ml)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by monovergent@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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Got myself a Dell Latitude ~~E4310~~ E6410 and Thinkpad T510 for free, both with discrete Nvidia graphics soldered to the mainboard. I've installed Linux on them and just went with the nouveau driver since the proprietary Nvidia driver for such old cards is no longer in the Debian 12 repo. Not going to do anything cutting edge on them, but it does leave me wondering:

  • I read that I could, with some effort, install the proprietary driver manually. Am I missing out on anything at all without them, or is nouveau mature enough and the graphics old enough that I wouldn't notice?
  • Is nouveau with old discrete graphics better or worse than having just Intel's integrated graphics?
  • Does power consumption vary significantly between nouveau and proprietary drivers?

EDIT

Answering myself after going down a rabbit hole with the T510:

  1. The dGPU is the NVS 3100M, which does have some level of hardware acceleration support under nouveau, so at least it isn't draining power for zero benefit. However, the dGPU is unable to go past its lowest power state without manually manipulating /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/pstate (I did not try to) and I suspect that this is what kneecaps 3D performance. There should be a marked difference, but I won't be doing any serious work on these machines, so I'm leaving everything as-is.

  2. This situation is worse than having just integrated graphics due to the inherent power consumption of the GPU core while unable to benefit from higher power states and other optimizations.

  3. Power consumption is probably less, but for much worse performance. At least it is a much better fallback than leaving at maximum.

  • A later variant has the BIOS option to disable the dGPU, mine is an early variant with no options
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[–] nyan@sh.itjust.works 2 points 19 hours ago

One thing to keep in mind about older versions of the nvidia proprietary drivers is that they will only work with specific kernel versions (and specific X versions—not sure about Wayland). Once the driver series your card needs stops being updated, you can't update your kernel without patching the driver. Assuming you have the skills to patch the driver, or someone who does makes their patches public.

I went through this song-and-dance with a very old laptop that had a card of the NV40 generation as its only GPU (no integrated graphics). Eventually I did install nouveau on it, and used it for several years without any issues.