Turing Notebooks: Potential performance losses due to Optimus
Optimus seems to be struggling...
In this short article, you can read about why Optimus, Nvidia's graphics switching technology, does not yet work perfectly with mobile RTX graphics cards.
Florian Glaser (translated by Marius S.), Published
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.
Marius Schell - Tech Writer - 398 articles published on Notebookcheck since 2020
Even in my youth I was already very enthusiastic about technology, and as a result I started building PCs, optimizing them, and writing programs while I was still in school. When dealing with the inevitable hardware and software problems associated with computers, I was always relentless in my search for the necessary solutions. The compact forms of laptops and smartphones introduced further challenges in this regard. In my reviews for Notebookcheck I try to communicate as objectively as possible how well a device copes with these hurdles.
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