Turing Notebooks: Potential performance losses due to Optimus

When Nvidia first released Optimus, its graphics-switching technology, the respective notebooks that utilized it experienced a certain drop in performance compared to laptops that did not support GPU switching. In our experience, Optimus and the graphics driver were improved by enough to completely eliminate or at least reduce the difference in frame rates to less than 5%.

Currently, notebooks with Nvidia's brand-new Turing chips appear to suffer a lot due to Optimus. We have noticed this phenomenon during our test of the Asus ROG Zephyrus S GX701GX. In order to perform QHD and 4K tests, we connected an external display, which receives images directly from the dedicated Nvidia GPU, disabling Optimus automatically. We were quite surprised to find that the RTX 2080 Max-Q performed way better in FIFA 19 at 2560x1440 pixels than at 1920x1080 pixels on the internal Full HD panel. After another round of tests (see table below) it became apparent that Optimus was the cause of the underwhelming performance.

It has yet to be determined whether there is a problem with the official release driver (ForceWare 418.81) or with the Turing generation in general. In any case, it does not hurt to be aware of this issue.