I render with a trusty old AMD quad running Debian 9.2, 16GB of ram and a EVGA 1050Ti 4GB card. On a recent reboot I noticed that the benchmark render had gone from a respectable 4:20 to over 20 minutes. The problem turned out to be that the nvidia driver was stuck at performance level 0. For the 1050Ti there are 3 perf levels and even though it claimed to be “auto” it wasn’t, changing the scheme to “Prefer high performance” was ignored.
If other users on the 375 driver have this issue, I’d be interested in hearing about other fixes other than what I did: force the driver to run at its highest performance level. This is the change in the Device section of xorg.conf,
Option "RegistryDwords" "PowerMizerEnable=0x1; PerfLevelSrc=0x2222; PowerMizerDefaultAC=0x1" Option "Coolbits" "13"
The downside is that with these settings the driver will run at high performance even when you are doing menial non-graphical things like editing. I’d rather be stuck at perf 2 than perf 0 but I wish the “power mizer” wasn’t so useless.
After a reboot I got a respectable 4 minute render on the benchmark.