The people who claim only some people are affected by this bug are completely 
off base.  This is a bug that affects everyone.  It is ridiculous that the 
setting for the nvidia powermizer is not saved when you change it unless you do 
so by manually editing xorg.conf.  It's also pretty annoying that it defaults 
to the lowest performance setting even on a desktop.  On my system this results 
in what is a pretty decent nvidia card using performance that would have been 
considered weak something like 10 years ago.  I'm talking about clocks going 
down to 1/12 speed.
And it should not affect desktop performance, but it does.  It especially seems 
to affect video.  And like pretty much all "adaptive" cpu technologies to date 
it is not very adaptive in that it does not change performance levels quickly 
enough if at all.  I read something online that suggested that powermizer waits 
15 seconds after detecting a performance change to change performance.
There are settings available to make powermizer default to a different 
performance mode and even set it to be smart enough to use a different setting 
when on ac power versus battery power.  Of course right now the change in 
performance mode is not saved when done through the gui and there is no gui way 
to change the other stuff, but the capability exists.  There's really no excuse 
for this bug having persisted for years without relief.
The problem I see with editing xorg.conf manually, besides the fact there is a 
lot of misinformation and bad instructions out there for how to set powermizer 
therein which have led people to a bad pass at times and besides the 
aforementioned problem that this is a high bar for the target Ubuntu user, is 
that what you put in there is likely to get blown away unless there is some 
awareness in the tools involved and installers that also edit xorg.conf on a 
regular basis.
All that aside, quite apart from the fact that EVERYONE will suffer from bad 
performance and settings not being saved, there are clearly a significant set 
of cards, etc, that actually have flickering and freezing problems from 
powermizer.  That would be solved if it defaulted to off and could be changed 
later somehow.  In any case, absent that it will be difficult for most people 
to  fix once they are in that state where they can't even see or log in, and I 
would imagine there are not many who would even figure out that powermizer was 
the problem in the first place.
The nvidia-settings app is nvidia's, as is powermizer itself, so I see some of 
the passing of the buck there.  However, there's no reason we can't do 
something about xorg.conf within Ubuntu.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/456637

Title:
  Please consider turning powermizer OFF

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