Disable vertical sync for glxgears

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.

$>   vblank_mode=0 glxgears

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.

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" >> ~/.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