Disable vertical sync for glxgears

Question

Sometimes you need to check whether you Linux 3D acceleration is really working  besides the glxinfo output   This can be quickly done by the glxgears tool  However  the FPS are often limited to the displays vertical refresh rate  i e  60 fps   So the tool becomes more or less useless since even a software render can produce 60FPS glxgears easily on modern CPUs    I found it rather hard to get a quick and easy solution for this  I answer my own question  Hopefully it saves your time

User · Answer

Disabling the Sync to VBlank checkbox in nvidia-settings  OpenGL Settings tab  does the trick for me

User · Answer

The vblank mode environment variable does the trick  You should then get several hundreds FPS on modern hardware  And you are now able to compare the results with others     gt    vblank mode 0 glxgears

User · Answer

For Intel graphics and AMD ATI opensource graphics drivers  Find the  Device  section of  etc X11 xorg conf which contains one of the following directives    Driver  intel  Driver  radeon  Driver  fglrx    And add the following line to that section   Option      SwapbuffersWait         false    And run your application with vblank mode environment variable set to 0     vblank mode 0 glxgears   For Nvidia graphics with the proprietary Nvidia driver    echo  0 SyncToVBlank 0   gt  gt     nvidia-settings-rc   The same change can be made in the nvidia-settings GUI by unchecking the option at X Screen 0   OpenGL Settings   Sync to VBlank  Or  if you d like to just test the setting without modifying your    nvidia-settings-rc file you can do something like     nvidia-settings --load-config-only --assign  SyncToVBlank 0     disable vertical sync   glxgears    test it out   nvidia-settings --load-config-only    restore your original vertical sync setting

User · Answer

I found a solution that works in the intel card and in the nvidia card using Bumblebee          export vblank mode 0   glxgears         optirun glxgears         export vblank mode 1

User · Answer

For intel drivers  there is also this method  Disable Vertical Synchronization  VSYNC  The intel-driver uses Triple Buffering for vertical synchronization  this allows for full performance and avoids tearing  To turn vertical synchronization off  e g  for benchmarking  use this  drirc in your home directory    lt device screen  quot 0 quot  driver  quot dri2 quot  gt       lt application name  quot Default quot  gt           lt option name  quot vblank mode quot  value  quot 0 quot   gt       lt  application gt   lt  device gt

User · Answer

If you re using the NVIDIA closed-source drivers you can vary the vertical sync mode on the fly using the   GL SYNC TO VBLANK environment variable        GL SYNC TO VBLANK 1 glxgears Running synchronized to the vertical refresh   The framerate should be approximately the same as the monitor refresh rate  299 frames in 5 0 seconds   59 631 FPS       GL SYNC TO VBLANK 0 glxgears 123259 frames in 5 0 seconds   24651 678 FPS   This works for me on Ubuntu 14 04 using the 346 46 NVIDIA drivers

User · Answer

Putting the other answers all together  here s a command line that will work   env vblank mode 0   GL SYNC TO VBLANK 0 glxgears   This has the advantages of working for both Mesa and NVidia drivers  and not requiring any changes to configuration files

[linux] Disable vertical sync for glxgears

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