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The proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver has a slider within its nvidia-settings utility for adjusting the OpenGL image settings, but do those settings have much of an affect on performance?
As it's been a while since I last played around a lot with all of the NVIDIA driver toggles in the NVIDIA Settings utility, I ran some fresh tests when trying out each of the different OpenGL image settings offered by their Linux driver: High Quality, High Performance, Performance, and Quality.
Long story short, there wasn't much change in performance... The most volatility was with Team Fortress 2:
However, as you can see, there wasn't much change in performance and oddly the quality setting performed higher than performance. Tests on some other modern OpenGL Linux games can be found via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. I also hadn't noticed any real graphical differences to the eye when playing around with this slider (the Phoronix Test Suite can do automated image quality comparisons, but only older/open-source games like Nexuiz offer the proper documented engine support for making it work properly). So put simply, this image settings option doesn't have a huge impact, at least for a GeForce GTX 980 Maxwell.
Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.
