Glxgears No Vertical Synchronization

Glxgears is a very simple benchmarking tool for your graphics card.

Running glxgears with no vsync (vertical synchronization) is a great simple way to do a very simple benchmark of your graphical situation when you are testing out drivers on your linux system.

You just run the command: vblank_mode=0 glxgears

Easy way to see current graphics driver in use in Xorg: egrep -i " connected|card detect|primary dev|Setting driver" /var/log/Xorg.0.log

You get great info from: glxinfo | grep -i vendor

Example output:

glxinfo | grep -i vendor
server glx vendor string: SGI
client glx vendor string: Mesa Project and SGI
   Vendor: Intel Open Source Technology Center (0x8086)
OpenGL vendor string: Intel Open Source Technology Center
 

Here is some example output from my T450s with a GM108M [GeForce 940M] graphics card.

With the free open source Nouveau Nvidia driver.

vblank_mode=0 glxgears
ATTENTION: default value of option vblank_mode overridden by environment.
ATTENTION: default value of option vblank_mode overridden by environment.
12665 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2532.994 FPS
13499 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2699.760 FPS
13739 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2747.705 FPS

With the Nvidia driver 370.23

glxinfo | grep -i vendor  
server glx vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
client glx vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation

vblank_mode=0 glxgears
Running synchronized to the vertical refresh.  The framerate should be
approximately the same as the monitor refresh rate.
35758 frames in 5.0 seconds = 7151.557 FPS
45893 frames in 5.0 seconds = 9178.570 FPS
46506 frames in 5.0 seconds = 9301.079 FPS

Useful commands for more info about the graphics driver installed:

lspci | grep VGA ; lsmod | grep "kms\|drm" ; find /dev -group video ; \
cat /proc/cmdline ; find /etc/modprobe.d/; cat /etc/modprobe.d/*kms* ; \
ls /etc/X11/xorg.conf ; glxinfo | grep -i "vendor\|rendering" ; \
grep LoadModule /var/log/Xorg.0.log