Testing NVIDIA Optimus / DRI PRIME On Ubuntu 14.04

For benchmarking the ASUS Zenbook Prime ultrabooks with its dual GPUs in an NVIDIA Optimus configuration on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, I did the following test runs:

Intel HD 4000 - Stock: The out-of-the-box configuration of the hardware/software on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. This is with Mesa 10.1 and the Linux 3.13 kernel while not setting DRI_PRIME or installing the binary blob. Just the open-source Intel graphics driver is being tested with no other modifications.

Nouveau DRI PRIME 1: The above configuration, but when setting DRI_PRIME=1 to utilize the NVIDIA GeForce GT 620M GPU with the open-source Nouveau Gallium3D driver as shipped by default in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Again, Mesa 10.1 with Linux 3.13.

NVIDIA 331.38: After installing the nvidia-331 Linux graphics driver on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS as its current latest-packaged NVIDIA proprietary driver. The GeForce GT 620M having its full performance exploited by the proprietary NVIDIA driver.

Intel HD 4000 - NVIDIA Prime: The NVIDIA 331.38 proprietary driver was still installed, but using nvidia-settings the graphics were switched over to using the Intel HD Graphics 4000.

Under these four configurations, I ran a variety of Linux OpenGL gaming benchmarks. The benchmarks were run while the ASUS Zenbook Prime ultrabook was running off its battery and the Phoronix Test Suite was automatically recording the power consumption in real-time and calculating the performance-per-Watt.

All of this NVIDIA Optimus / DRI PRIME performance data from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with this Intel ultrabook is on the following pages.