I switched to mint/serena for the past few weeks (from Win 7 , i5, 16 GB RAM) And it’s barely usable. I reduced the swappiness to 10, updated apt, I tried Blender 2.77 which completely crashed when using multires. Now I’m on 2.78.5 which works but gets unusable at ~300 verts. Whereas with Win 7 I was fine until ~1.5 Mil. How can I get this machine working better with Blender?
Proprietary or free graphics drivers?
Driver manager says ‘no proprietary’ drivers in use, and I never explicitly installed any. Motherboard is a msi Z87-G43
But you have the GTX 780 from your signature in that machine?
Then you should install the corresponding proprietary drivers ASAP.
BTW, that should also allow Blender to use GPU rendering - in addition to (hopefully) better performance.
3 weeks ago: I installed mint with my GTX 780, and was attempting to get tensorflow or theano with GPU support working. I have Theano working on the WIN 7 box. So I install mint and I am fiddling around for days with nvidia drivers/ cudnn, etc. At some point I completely destroy my machine, it will not boot , starts barfing about a nouveaux driver which I think is mint’s default video driver. Even recovery mode won’t work. Also I’m noticing random weird green pixels even during boot and BIOS. Nothing will work, I can’t even boot to the live CD! So I pull my gpu and I am able to boot but it’s still having problems so I reinstall mint without my GPU and that’s where I am right now. I am using the on board VGA for video.
Weird. How did you install the proprietary driver?
With Mint’s/ubuntu’s “Device Driver Manager”/“Additional Drivers” applet I can honestly say that I never had any issues. Nouveau is the open source nVidia driver. Swapping that for the proprietary one should be successfully handled by “Additional Drivers” in one go…
Hi.
How did you install nvidia drivers?
Just in case, you never install drivers with .run file provided by nvidia. You install drivers from distro repositories or distro driver manager.
Edit:
I think it’s very unlikely that Mint has broken your hardware. Can I ask why you wanted to try Linux? Were you having those kind of strange problems previously in Windows?
I never said Mint broke my GPU. That’s not even really possible.
What does it matter why I wanted to use Linux? I like Linux better than Windows philosophically. How does that have anything to do with Blender lagging at 300k verts after a clean install?
You said:
Sorry if I misinterpreted. Display problems in BIOS have nothing to do with OS installation, this may indicate hardware problem. That’s why I assumed you were referring to hardware problems. And that’s why I asked if you were having some kind of problems previously in Windows that led you to try Linux.
So, that 1.5 mil polygon limit in Windows was also with your onboard VGA (Intel, I’d guess)?
Well, you might have to live with the fact that graphics performance in Linux can be significantly worse than in Windows, due to Linux’ drivers being much less refined (depending on the hardware/driver combination, of course).
YAFU: I do believe that the GPU began having unrelated hardware problems, I did breifly have GPU woking on mint and blender. I can see how my original phrasing makes it look like I Am blaming mint for my gpu breaking, I am not. I wasn’t switching because of any issues with Win.
Ikari, on the original (now gone) install, with the GPU, I think I tried several different ways to install the nvidia driver. I used apt I think something like apt-get install nvidia 375, I think I used a ppa at somepoint, I probably downloaded source files form nvidia also. pip was used maybe. There seems to be so many different ways to install drivers on mint that it quite confusing. For every comment about you ‘should never use method x’ there is another ‘always use x, but never use y!’
serioulys how can you know which to use:
- make files, install from nvidia souce:
- pip
- apt
- ppas
- driver/software manager
follow up question, If I use 2 (or more different methods to install a driver) how do I know which one the system is using?
I’m not sure what application exists in Mint for hardware details. Driver information in use should be displayed in Mint driver manager. The easy way to know if your system is using proprietary driver is from the terminal:
cat /proc/driver/nvidia/version
Installing with “sudo apt-get install” or from Driver Manager is basically the same, you are installing drivers from repositories.
Easy/fast way to view installed nvidia packages:
sudo dpkg -l | grep -i nvidia
(“ii” at the beginning means currently installed packages)
Or just search from graphical interface Mint package manager.
If the distro has a dedicated tool with an accessible graphical user interface to install and manage proprietary drivers, why not use it? That’s what Mint’s Device Driver Manager was made for: Provide a (near) fool-proof method for new users.
If you know what you’re doing, you can skip that and have fun with ppas, terminal commands and manual installation. The keywords in the former sentence are “know what you’re doing”. I’m not trying to be a wisenheimer, I’m just saying that you somehow overcomplicated things and got out of your depth quickly, as it seems.
I Hear you, but you have to break things a few times before you ‘know what you’re doing’ Blender included. It seems like ppas are the most dangerous as they are pre built and your machine may not match the specs.
Let me re-phrase: What can I do to increase blender’s viewport performance in Linux?
e.g.
Can I increase the amount of physical memory blender can access?
Is it safe to increase blender’s thread cpu priority?
are there some flags/ini files/ or other hacks to increase blenders speed?
I’m not sure you should have low performance with nvidia proprietary drivers. I think ‘IkariShinji’ was referring to OpenSource drivers, I’m not sure.
I’m also not sure that intel problems are due to bad drivers, just not powerful GPUs.
YAFU, I no longer even have the gpu in my machine. Forget nvidia, this is a fresh intall of mint on cpu.
From my understanding of this thread Photox was able to sculpt up to 1.5 M polygons with his onboard VGA in Windows, but now sees lagging in Linux on the same device whenever he reaches 300 K polygons.
If the hardware is the same, the reason for the performance issues might very well be poor Intel graphics support on Linux.
Ok, sorry.
I have Intel HD4000 iGPU and I could also do some testing on Linux to try and figure out how to improve it. The last time I tried it, even eevee was working on HD4000.
Could you share a simple heavy scene where you are having poorly performance? So I try later and do some tests.
Hmmm, now I seem to be able to sculpt at higher vert counts. I have/had been simultaneously running memory heavy python code through pycharm, I wonder if that was causing the slowdowns? That may have been it.
When you want to use a GPU for rendering (or for computation) you would normally not use it for your monitor, you would use on board VGA or a less powerful gpu, right?
That’s right, but to use iGPU as primary display and be able tu use CUDA, nvidia makes it difficult for Linux. 361.42 is the last driver that worked for me. Then it was broken in subsequent drivers, and I do not know if they solved the problem in current versions. For this you need nvidia proprietary driver properly installed, and the truth is that still I do not understand if you had managed to do so or what happened with your nvidia card.