poor graphic performance nVidia 745M + Intel HD

[matteo92]

Hello, I am a former Ubuntu user, but last time I installed Ubuntu it was 12.04 and I had a totally different laptop, so consider me as a real noob =)

I am facing many issues after a fresh install of Mint Cinnamon 18.3 on my Asus N550LF, featuring Intel i7 4500 with integrated graphic card and dedicated nVidia GeForce 745M. 8Gb RAM / 256GB SSD. I would have expected quite good performance, my hardware is not that new but it's still rock solid on Windows 10. This is what I did:
1) fresh install of Mint 18.3, no dual boot + reboot
2) complete update of the system (even kernel updates) + reboot
3) installation of recommended (latest) proprietary nVidia driver + reboot
4) some testing to understand the performance of both integrated and nVidia graphic cards

Unfortunately, both of them performs poorly.
1) integrated Intel graphic card has some serious tearing issues when scrolling down web pages, I can clearly see text rows overlapping horizontally for a while. This is not at all what I expect, even from an integrated card. Actually, I have not installed the microcode Intel driver, should I do this?
2) nVidia graphic card is not that better. Moving and resizing windows clearly highlight some graphical glitches

Moreover, I think that fan is almost always on, even though is not running at his maximum speed, it is running even while performing very easy tasks (almost nothing, to be honest)

All these signals let me think I am facing some big issues with my graphic cards. I tried to disable hardware acceleration from Firefox and I also tried Chromium, but nothing changed. I honestly thought that I could be a decent hardware to use linux for internet browsing, movies and programming, but now I am start thinking I was wrong. Any suggestions?

This is the terminal output when I am running Intel Graphic card (fan always on)

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sudo lshw -C video
[sudo] password for matteo: 
  *-display               
       description: VGA compatible controller
       product: Haswell-ULT Integrated Graphics Controller
       vendor: Intel Corporation
       physical id: 2
       bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0
       version: 09
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: msi pm vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
       configuration: driver=i915 latency=0
       resources: irq:43 memory:f7400000-f77fffff memory:d0000000-dfffffff ioport:f000(size=64) memory:c0000-dffff

[matteo92]

UPDATE:
INTEL
I applied the following tip
Speed Up your Linux Mint - Improve Video Performance on Intel Graphics
https://sites.google.com/site/easylinux ... l-graphics

To sum up, just remove old Intel graphic drivers:

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sudo apt-get remove xserver-xorg-video-intel

and reboot. please follow the guide step by step to ensure you have a card affected by this issues, even though it seems than any Intel graphics of the last 10 years have poor performace due to this pre-installed drivers.

After this tweak, tearing and rendering issues almost disappeared. Still some issues with font rendering in PDF reader (Xreader), but the workaround is using other readers like the browser itself (Chromium, Firefox) and MuPDF.
NVIDIA GT745M
This should be the "performance" mode of my laptop, but... graphic performance are quite poor! moving and resizing windows shows some graphic glitches that are not visible with the modest integrated Intel card. I definitely think there is room for improvement.

The Kernel I am using on Linux Mint 18.3 Cinnamon

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4.13.0-36-generic

The nVidia proprietary drivers I am using:

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 sudo apt list --installed nvidia*
Listing... Done
nvidia-384/xenial-updates,xenial-security,now 384.111-0ubuntu0.16.04.1 amd64 [installed]
nvidia-opencl-icd-384/xenial-updates,xenial-security,now 384.111-0ubuntu0.16.04.1 amd64 [installed]
nvidia-prime/sylvia,now 0.8.2linuxmint1 amd64 [installed]
nvidia-prime-applet/sylvia,sylvia,now 1.0.6 all [installed]
nvidia-settings/xenial,now 361.42-0ubuntu1 amd64 [installed]

Do you suggest to use an External PPA to get the latest drivers? I am always concerned about using external sources...