What is there to prepare , just hit play and have fun , right ?

Well ,no ,it's not that simple ,let me explain

If you have a weak NVIDIA card just like me ,for example MX350 that is meant for laptops ,you may have noticed immediately that the card is not giving it's full performance ,you may have thought ,maybe gaming on Linux or Ubuntu is not yet ready for gaming or something like that and that people may have lied about getting the same performance as windows in games or lucky, if not ,at least I did .

Until ...

Until I tried Counter-strike 2 ,a native Linux game ,it should run smoothly no matter what ,it should even run better than windows ,there is no proton layer that translates code .

It was bad ,I am talking about having under 60 fps in game ,this is a native game that is meant to be played om Linux systems ,what is wrong with my Ubuntu desktop or NVIDIA card ?

Turns out ,it's NVIDIA ,especially that NVIDIA X server settings APP ,it's not about not having the latest driver ,it's about the NVIDIA card not utilizing itself to max performance ,I noticed that the fan speed is slow ,the laptop didn't heat as much ,something is off ,in windows when I game , it sound like a jet plane ,but not on Ubuntu ,why ? Hmmmm...

I tried what I know ,I tested and found out .

This is misleading :

It's not truly max performance ,to explain further ,read this hint :

In short

• Auto = driver picks
• Adaptive = clock speed will change based on card utilization
• Prefer maximum performance = hint to the driver to do it's best

In game ,prefer maximum performance ,the fps fluctuates too much ,it's unplayable ,I think hinting is not enough ,after all ,no one knows how the driver works because it a proprietary driver ,that's why ,I suggest to put it on auto ,let the driver do it's magic and let it decide .

But that is not enough ,even with this noted ,it's still not the true power of my card ,I searched and searched and found out that I need to do a restart with performance mode on in Ubuntu power mode options .

To summarize : you need to set NVIDIA PowerMizer settings ,preferred mode to auto ,plus your power mode to performance in Ubuntu then restart ,starting up with performance mode and having the laptop plugged in will get you 95% same performance as windows ,well at least until Ubuntu 24.04 allows to use 555 driver ,then you will get 99% similar performance compared to windows .

I hope I'm wrong ,I don't like restarting every time I want to play ,if someone knows what is happening ,please explain .

see you later . 👋